Assembly line balancing problem using Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm

Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) is one of the important problems of production/operations management area. Due to the NP-hard nature of the ALB problem, heuristics are generally used to solve real life problems. This paper presents an approach, based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, to effectively address the assembly line balance problem with the complicating factors of parallel workstations. The method of linearly decreasing the inertia weight of the PSO (LDWPSO) is used in this paper to compare with the standard PSO. Experimental results show that the LDWPSO algorithm is superior to the standard PSO on some assembly line balancing problem.