Development and Optimization of a Novel Green Assembly Line Balancing Formulation

Optimizing the arrangement of tasks at workstations within the framework of assembly line balancing (ALB) is crucial for adhering to specific constraints and achieving defined objectives. The ALBP typically arises during the establishment of a new production line or when re-configuring an existing production system. Indeed, an improper allocation of tasks among the workstations can lead to downtime and unnecessary additional costs. Through a literature review, it was observed that there is a somewhat limited body of work on the energy aspect of the ALBP. Therefore, a new green balancing model was sought to be developed with a focus on this dimension. This paper presents a new variant so called Green assembly line resource assignment balancing problem (GrALRABP) that has a set of restrictions to be met and a fixed number of workstations. The goal of this ALBP model is to ensure that task precedence and machine compatibility constrains are followed while concurrently minimizing cycle time, hourly cost, and energy consumption of the current machines in the assembly line. Because ALBPs are classified as NP-hard problems, the resolution of this model was achieved using a meta heuristic approach based on the Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) algorithm. The validation of the proposed approach was carried out by comparing the results obtained by the proposed algorithm with those achieved using the ε-constraint method on a literature-based example. This comparison demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.