Bottleneck Mitigation of Assembly Lines with Memetic Algorithms

Bottlenecks heavily affect the material flow and workloads of assembly lines, and eventually constrain the productivity. The most economic way to eliminate or mitigate bottlenecks of a specific assembly line is to smooth the workloads at different stations towards a balanced system. This paper formulates a smoothness index, by which to measure the uniformity of worldoads at serially located stations. To minimize the smoothness index, a Memetic algorithm is adopted and coding/decoding methods of the algorithm are devised. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated by a comparison with computing results of Package Lingo 11.0.