Multi-neighborhood based path relinking for two-sided assembly line balancing problem

This paper presents a multi-neighborhood based path relinking algorithm (MN-PR) for solving the two-sided assembly line balancing problem. By incorporating an effective local search into a path relinking framework, the proposed MN-PR algorithm integrates a number of distinguishing features, such as a multi-neighborhood based local search procedure, a dedicated path relinking operator to generate new solutions and a strategy to fix an infeasible solution generated by the path relinking procedure to a feasible one. Our proposed MN-PR algorithm is tested on a set of totally 45 public instances widely used in the literature. Comparisons with other reference algorithms show the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in terms of the solution quality. Particularly, the proposed MN-PR algorithm is able to improve the best upper bounds for one instance with 65 tasks and 326 cycle time. This paper also presents an analysis to show the significance of the main components of the proposed algorithm.