Artificial bee colony algorithms for two-sided assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem

Worker assignment is a new type of problem in assembly line balancing problems, which typically occurs in sheltered work centers for the disabled. However, only a few contributions consider worker assignment in a two-sided assembly line. This research presents three variants of artificial bee colony algorithm to solve worker assignment and line balancing in two-sided assembly lines. The utilization of meta-heuristics is motivated by the NP-hard nature of the problem and the chosen methods utilize different operators for onlooker phase and scout phase. The proposed algorithms are tested on 156 cases generated from benchmark problems. A comparative study is conducted on the results obtained from the three proposed variants and other well-known metaheuristic algorithms, such as simulated annealing, particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm. The computational study demonstrates that the proposed variants produce more promising results and are able to solve this new problem effectively in an acceptable computational time.