Worker skills and equipment optimization in assembly line balancing by a genetic approach

The Assembly Line Balancing Problem (ALBP) is to determine the optimal allocation of assembly operations to a set of workstations, with respect to precedence constraints. This paper proposes a multi-objective optimization to solve the ALBP using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach. The aim is to minimize, besides the number of workstations, two aspects, very important from an economic point of view, but poorly treated in literature: the number of high skilled workers needed to correctly accomplish the operations and the number of assembly equipment along the line. A case study was finally discussed in order to demonstrate the capability of the proposed method in finding optimized solutions in different scenarios. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of the 6th CIRP Conference on Assembly Technologies and Systems (CATS).