A U-shaped Assembly Line Balance Optimization Study Considering Manual Allocation

With the rapid economic development and the transformation and upgrading of product manufacturing,the development prospects of the manufacturing industry are facing huge opportunities and challenges.A single product manufactured by traditional production lines can no longer meet people's needs,and lean production has emerged.U-shaped assembly line is one of the means to realize the effectiveness of flexible management of production line and humanized management of workers.Therefore,enterprises now prefer U-shaped layout production.However,the balance of the assembly line is an NP problem,and how to efficiently achieve the balance of the assembly line has attracted widespread attention from all walks of life.Since the U-shaped assembly line involves manual assembly operations,the work performance of the workers is bound to affect the efficiency of the assembly line.The different knowledge,skills and proficiency of workers means that each worker has different time to deal with problems,which also causes the actual task time to be inconsistent with the prescribed standard time.Therefore,studying the problem of production line balance is also studying the problem of worker performance.However,previous studies on U-shaped line assembly line balance assumed that task time has nothing to do with worker performance.This paper takes the maximization of production efficiency as the research goal,constructs the performance coefficient of each worker,and incorporates the worker's skills and performance into the U-shaped assembly line balance problem for research,and establishes the non-linear mathematics of UALWABPE on this basis model.However,traditional optimization algorithms take a long time to solve and have insufficient accuracy,and are not suitable for large-scale applications.In order to facilitate the solution,this paper uses correlation transformation to linearize the model.At the same time,this paper also designed two heuristic algorithms,genetic algorithm and artificial bee colony algorithm,to solve large-scale assembly line balance problems.The data sets of Cevickan and Araújo were used for testing.The results showed that traditional mathematical models and heuristics Algorithms can better solve the problem of assembly line balance considering worker performance,and find the global optimal solution.However,compared with traditional mathematical models,the optimal solution can be found in a shorter time through heuristics.This also further shows that the heuristic algorithm constructed in this paper has good performance and can solve the problem of large-scale U-shaped assembly line balance in a relatively short time.The contribution of this research lies in the establishment of a mathematical model of the U-shaped assembly line worker assignment and balance problem considering worker performance,and the artificial bee colony algorithm for this type of problem,which provides a reference method for further solving the U-shaped assembly line balance problem.