Solving a Multi Objective Mixed Model Assembly Line Balancing Problem in Garment Industry

The motivation of our work is from the paper by Chen et al. (2012) in which the assembly line balancing (ALB) problem in the garment manufacturing process for a single model is solved by using genetic algorithm. Out of four steps of manufacturing the product, we focus on the third step in their paper in which there is a sewing line which is to be operated by different employees having different skill levels. Further, textile industry manufactures many varieties of cloths with different designs and it is not possible to keep new lines for all different designs of cloth. The best way is to launch the models on the same line that can efficiently handle all the different operations needed by the models. This will also reduce the manufacturing cost of the plant. Therefore, in this paper we have considered the stitching of more than one model during the sewing operation on the same line. The problem is to assign proper task to workstations so that machines on workstations can perform the assigned task with balanced workload.