Multi-objective balancing of assembly lines by population heuristics

This paper is concerned with the solution of the multi-objective single-model deterministic assembly line balancing problem. Two bi-criteria objectives are considered; (i) minimising the cycle time of the assembly line and the balance delay time of the workstations; (ii) minimising the cycle time and the smoothness index of the workload of the line. A new population heuristic is proposed to solve the problem based on the general differential evolution method.