Study and Analysis of GA-Based Heuristic Applied to Assembly Line Balancing Problem

Balancing assembly line in a mass production system plays a vital role to improve the productivity of a manufacturing system. In this paper, a single model assembly line balancing problem (SMALBP) is considered. The objective of this problem is to group the tasks in the assembly network into a minimum number of workstations for a given cycle time such that the balancing efficiency is maximized. This problem comes under combinatorial category. So, it is essential to develop efficient heuristic to find the near optimal solution of the problem in less time. In this paper, an attempt has been made to design four different genetic algorithm (GA)-based heuristics, and analyze them to select the best amongst them. The analysis has been carried out using a complete factorial experiment with three factors, viz. problem size, cycle time, and algorithm, and the results are reported.