Bee colony algorithm for mixed-model two sided assembly line balancing problem

Balancing of assembly lines is one of the most important problems among the other problems of assembly lines like designing and managing. Two-sided assembly lines are generally occurred in assembly of large-sized products such as buses and trucks. On the other hand, Bee Algorithms is a relatively new member of swarm intelligence based meta-heuristics which tries to model natural behavior of real honey bees in food foraging. This study presents an approach to address the two-sided mixed-model assembly line balancing problem. First, a mathematical programming model is presented to formally describe the problem. Then, a bee colony optimisation algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. In the proposed algorithm, two performance criteria are considered simultaneously: maximizing the weighted line efficiency and minimizing the weighted smoothness index. The proposed approach is illustrated with an example problem, and its performance is tested on a set of test problems.