Assembly Line Balancing Using ACO Algorithm and RPW Method: A Comparative Case Study

Khairun Nahar, Md. Ahasan Habib, Md. Ashraful Alam Nayon and Md. Mosharraf Hossain

Assembly Line balancing is one of the widely used basic principles in production system which improves the throughput of assembly line while reducing non value-added activities, cycle time and also ensures maximization of labor efficiency. Line balancing problem deals with the distribution of activities among the workstations for large scale production so that there will be maximum utilization of human resources and facilities without disturbing the work sequence. In an industrial environment to make certain standardized commodities it is assumed that operation times on the machines, and the precedence relationship existing between the operations which results from the technology of the production line and the cycle time or the number of machines are known. This paper focuses on minimization of the number of workstation and to maximize the balancing efficiency by applying Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm for the simple assembly line balancing problem. Besides using fixed cycle time trial cycle time also used to obtain the maximized output. The balancing efficiency have analyzed by assigning each task to the workstation for every of the ranged cycle time and finally concluded that the balancing efficiency is inversely related to the idle time of an assembly line. Rank Positional Weight (RPW) method is also used here to determine the desired findings. Finally a comparison has been made between ACO & RPW and it is found that when the cycle time minimum then balancing efficiency is maximum if the number of workstation is unchanged.