Development of a Neural Network for Optimization and Its Application to Assembly Line Balancing

This study develops a neural network for solving optimization problems. Hopfield network has been used for such problems, but it frequently gives abnormal solutions or non-optimal solutions. Moreover, it takes much time for solving a solution. To overcome such disadvantages, this study adopts a neural network whose output nodes change with a small value at every evolution, and the proposed neural network is applied to solve ALB (Assembly Line Balancing) problems . Given a precedence diagram and a required number of workstations, an ALB problem is solved while achieving even distribution of workload among workstations. Here, the workload variance is used as the index of workload deviation, and is reflected to an energy function. The simulation results show that the proposed neural network yields good results for solving ALB problems with high success rate and fast execution time.