An Ant-Based Algorithm for Balancing Assembly Lines in a Mass Customization Environment

Facing the intense competition, rising costs and ever changing consumer demands, many manufacturers switch to mass customization from mass manufacturing. The mass customization assembly line balancing problem arises to smooth the production and decrease the cost. However, the development towards mass customization has caused considerable increases in complexity within assembly line production processes. This paper presents a novel ant algorithm for the Type I mass customization assembly line balancing. The proposed algorithm made use of the trail information which is deposited between the task and the task selected position, and pheromone summation rules was adopted. According to the characteristics of the problem, a new nonlinear objective function is used to instead of the function of number of workstations. The results of the computational study show that the proposed approach performs quite effectively.