A Genetic Algorithm for Two-sided Assembly Line Balancing

양면 조립라인 밸런싱을 위한 유전알고리듬

Two-sided (left- and right-sided) assembly lines in practice can provide several advantages over one-sided lines in terms of the required line length, throughput time, cost of tools and fixtures, and so on. This paper considers two-sided assembly line balancing with the objective of minimizing line length. The balancing problem is more complicated than that of one-sided lines due to sequence-dependency of tasks assigned to a pair of directly facing workstations. This paper shows how genetic algorithm can be used to solve two-sided assembly line balancing. For this, an encoding and a decoding method suitable to the problem are presented. Proper genetic operators and an evalutation function are also employed. Extensive computational experiments are carried out to show the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. The results show that the algorithm is viable and promising in solution quality and computation time.