Balancing and sequencing in mixed model assembly lines using an endosymbiotic evolutionary algorithm

This paper presents a new method that can efficiently solve the integrated problem of line balancing and model sequencing in mixed model assembly lines (MMALs). Line balancing and model sequencing are important for an efficient use of MMALs. The two problems of balancing and sequencing MMALs are tightly related with each other. However, in almost all the existing researches on mixed-model production lines, the two problems have been considered separately. In this research, an endosymbiotic evolutionary algorithm, which is a kind of coevolutionary algorithm, is adopted as a methodology in order to solve the two problems simultaneously. This paper shows how to apply an endosymbiotic evolutionary algorithm to solving the integrated problem. Some evolutionary schemes are used in the algorithm to promote population diversity and search efficiency. The proposed algorithm is compared with the existing evolutionary algorithms in terms of solution quality and convergence speed. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach.