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In recent years, part feeding at assembly lines has become a critical issue as the result of a high level of product customization. The assembly line part feeding problem is a complex problem in which a number of decisions should be made in order to select the right quantity of each part to be supplied at the right time under a set of constraints. This study aims to cope with the part feeding problem at assembly lines by introducing a new memetic ant colony optimization-based heuristic algorithm. Due to the novelty of the problem and in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed memetic algorithm, a mathematical formulation is also presented. Case data from an automobile manufacturer and a set of generated instances are used to test both the mathematical model and the proposed memetic algorithm. The results reveal that although it is computationally difficult to solve the problem using the exact mathematical model, the mimetic algorithm was able to find sufficiently good solutions in a short period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assembly line balancing plays a significant role in mass production systems due to production efficiency and productivity. A number of researchers have recently shown great interest in this topic, especially in the area of simple assembly line balancing problems (SALBP), and several academic papers have been published on this topic using different exact, heuristic, and metaheuristic methods. Recently, Rashid et al. (Int J Adv Manuf Technol 59:335-349, ) reviewed one decade (2000-2010) of published studies on assembly sequence planning and assembly line balancing optimization, those studies that applied soft computing approaches. The scope of the Rashid et al. review in the area of assembly line balancing problems was reported to be on SALBP. In this paper, we suggest that the review by Rashid et al. and the conclusion drawn regarding SALBP are inaccurate in some parts, and some revisions to Rashid et al. (Int J Adv Manuf Technol 59:335-349, ) are necessary. Accordingly, a revision to Rashid et al.'s review paper is proposed, and a guide to future research is presented. Moreover, to have up-to-date information, the review is extended to also include the published studies in the period of 2011-2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

embly line balancing has a considerable place in industrial importance. Hence, a lot of researchers are interested in this subject and several papers have been published so far. Many exact, heuristic, metaheuristic, and hybrid approaches have been used to solve this type of problems. Recently Ponnanbalam et al. (Int J Adv Manuf Technol 16:341–352, 2000) have considered a multi-objective genetic algorithm utilizing several simple heuristic rules for solving the simple assembly line balancing problems, one of these rules was “rank positional weight (RPW)” originally published in Helgeson and Birnie (J Ind Eng 12(6):394–398, 1961). Through providing two possible justifications, this note suggests that the mentioned rule can be mistakenly utilized and some revisions in Ponnanbalam et al. (Int J Adv Manuf Technol 16:341–352, 2000) seem to be necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]