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.