A cost‐oriented model for balancing mixed‐model assembly lines with multi‐manned workstations

In many real world assembly line systems which the work‐piece is of large size more than one worker work on the same work‐piece in each station. This type of assembly line is called multi‐manned assembly line (MAL). In this paper, a cost‐oriented approach is used to model the mixed model multi‐manned assembly line balancing problem (MMALBP) with the aim of minimising total cost per production unit. A mathematical model is developed to solve the problem. Since the proposed model is NP‐hard, a genetic algorithm (GA) and a particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm are proposed to efficiently solve the problem. Parameters and operators of both algorithms are selected using the design of experiments (DOE) method. Several examples are solved to illustrate the proposed model and the algorithms.