Beam-ACO for Simple Assembly Line Balancing

Assembly line balancing problems are concerned with the optimization of manufacturing processes. In this paper we consider the so-called simple assembly line balancing problem with the objective of minimizing the number of used workstations. This problem is denoted by SALB-1 in the literature. For tackling this problem, we present a so-called Beam-ACO approach. This technique results from hybridizing the metaheuristic ant colony optimization with beam search. The experimental results show that our algorithm is a state-of-the-art method for this problem. It can solve 263 of 269 existing benchmark instances to optimality.