An improved flower pollination algorithm for solving a Type-II U-shaped assembly line balancing problem with energy consideration

Abstract

Purpose

The increasing energy shortage leads to worldwide attentions. This paper aims to develop a mathematical model and optimization algorithm to solve the energy-oriented U-shaped assembly line balancing problem. Different from most existing works, the energy consumption is set as a major objective.

Design/methodology/approach

An improved flower pollination algorithm (IFPA) is designed to solve the problem. The random key encoding mechanism is used to map the continuous algorithm into discrete problem. The pollination rules are modified to enhance the information exchange between individuals. Variable neighborhood search (VNS) is used to improve the algorithm performance.

Findings

The experimental results show that the two objectives are in conflict with each other. The proposed methodology can help manager obtain the counterbalance between them, for the larger size balancing problems, and the reduction in objectives is even more significant. Besides, the experiment results also show the high efficiency of the proposed IFPA and VNS.

Originality/value

The main contributions of this work are twofold. First, a mathematical model for the U-shaped assembly line balancing problem is developed and the model is dual foci including minimized SI and energy consumption. Second, an IFPA is proposed to solve the problem.

Citation

Zhang, B. and Xu, L. (2020), "An improved flower pollination algorithm for solving a Type-II U-shaped assembly line balancing problem with energy consideration", Assembly Automation, Vol. 40 No. 6, pp. 847-856. https://doi.org/10.1108/AA-07-2019-0144