A cooperative co-evolution approach for a line-seru conversion problem

The seru system is a new way of assembling products which is widely used in the electronics industry. Unlike the traditional assembly line, several small assembly units are constructed of which each is responsible for assembling an entire product. In this paper, the conversion process of assembly lines to seru systems (line-seru conversion) is studied. A cooperative co-evolution (CC) approach is proposed to solve the two sub-problems simultaneously, i.e. seru formation and seru loading. Specifically, redundant encoding is added to the encoding scheme so that serus can be adjusted during the evolutionary process as the market demands change. The computational result shows that by the adoption of coordination mechanism, CC outperforms other approaches in minimizing both total throughput time (TTPT) and total labor hours (TLH).