A novel competitive hybrid approach based on grouping evolution strategy algorithm for solving U-shaped assembly line balancing problems

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) are among the well-known problems in manufacturing systems that belong to NP-hard class of problems. In the literature, there are various metaheuristic methods proposed to solve different models of such a problem under various assumptions. This research considers the U-shaped ALBP and proposes a hybrid solution method based on grouping evolution strategy algorithm. To develop a competitive approach, two most popular constructive methods of solving ALBP including the ranked positional weight method, and COMSOAL algorithm are modified and improved. We investigate the effectiveness of the proposed improvements and evaluate the performance of the proposed approach via solving a number of existing problems in the literature and compare the results with some current methods in the literature. Computational results indicate that the proposed approach for solving U-shaped ALBP test problems performs efficiently and is able to obtain the global optimal solution of the most of high dimensional problems.