Cataloged from PDF version of article.An assembly line is a production line in which units move continuously through a
sequence of stations. The assembly line balancing problem is defined as the allocation of
tasks to an ordered sequence of stations subject to precedence constraints with the
objective of optimizing a performance measure. In this paper, we propose ant colony
algorithms to solve the single-model U-type assembly line balancing problem. We conduct
an extensive experimental study in which the performance of the proposed algorithm is
compared against best known algorithms reported in the literature. The results indicate
that the proposed algorithms display very competitive performance against them.
& 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved