Type-1 Robotic Assembly Line Balancing Problem That Considers Energy Consumption and Cross-Station Design

Abstract

Robotic assembly lines are widely applied to mass production because of their adaptability and versatility. As we know, using robots will lead to energy-consumption and pollution problems, which has been a hot-button topic in recent years. In this paper, we consider an assembly line balancing problem with minimizing the number of workstations as the primary objective and minimizing energy consumption as the secondary objective. Further, we propose a novel mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model considering a realistic production process design—cross-station task, which is an important contribution of our paper. The “cross-station task” design has already been applied to practice but rarely studied academically in type-1 RALBP. A simulated annealing algorithm is developed, which incorporates a restart mechanism and an improvement strategy. Computational tests demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is superior to two other classic algorithms, which are the particle swarm algorithm and late acceptance hill-climbing algorithm.