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Two-sided assembly line balancing using an ant-colony-based heuristic

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Abstract

Two-sided assembly line balancing (ALB) problems usually occur in plants which are producing large-sized high-volume products, such as buses, trucks, and domestic products. Many algorithms and heuristics have been proposed to balance the well known classical one-sided assembly lines. However, little attention has been paid to solve two-sided ALB problems. Moreover, according to our best knowledge, there is no published work in the literature on two-sided ALB problems with zoning constraints (2sALBz). In this study, an ant-colony-based heuristic algorithm is proposed for solving 2sALBz problems. This paper also makes one of the first attempts to show how an ant colony heuristic (ACH) can be applied to solve 2sALBz problems. In the paper, example applications are presented and computational experiments are performed to present the suitability of the ACH to solve 2sALBz problems. Promising results are obtained from the solution of several test problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Gaziantep, 27310, Gaziantep, Turkey

    Adil Baykasoglu & Türkay Dereli

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  1. Adil Baykasoglu
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  2. Türkay Dereli
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Correspondence to Adil Baykasoglu.

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Baykasoglu, A., Dereli, T. Two-sided assembly line balancing using an ant-colony-based heuristic. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 36, 582–588 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-006-0861-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-006-0861-3

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