Improved ant colony optimization for assembly line balancing problem

To solve type 1 of the Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem(SALBP-1),which minimized the number of stations for a given cycle time,an improved ant colony optimization was proposed.According to the characteristics of the SALBP-1,the method of dynamic generation of the tour network of ants was developed.The proposed algorithm made use of the trail information which was deposited between the task and the task selected position,and pheromone summation rules was adopted.The heuristic information was set to the position weight for tasks of SALBP-1,which considered processing time of the task and the number of successors.Finally,the proposed algorithm was tested and compared with literature test problems,and the result indicated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.