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Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Istanbul, Turkey, July 3 6, 2012

Multi-Objective Mathematical Model for Time and Space Assembly Line Balancing Problem
Maghsud Solimanpur Faculty of Engineering Urmia University, Urmia West Azerbaijan Province, Iran Behnaz Jaberi Faculty of Engineering Urmia University of Technology, Urmia West Azerbaijan Province, Iran Abstract
This paper focuses on solving the Time and Space Assembly Line Balancing Problem (TSALBP) with mathematical programming. The objective functions considered in the proposed model are in conflict and hence cannot be optimized simultaneously. After identifying the solutions in pareto frontier, a solution approach based on uniform design technique and TOPSIS method is used to determine the most suitable solution.

Keywords
Time and space assembly line balancing problem, Uniform design, Multi-objective programming, TOPSIS

1. Introduction
In general, an assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) aims at grouping the tasks in work stations in an efficient way. Most of the decision support systems for balancing industrial assembly lines are designed to report a huge number of possible line configurations, according to several criteria. An assembly line is a sequence of work stations connected to each other by a material handling system. ALBP belongs to the general class of sequencing problems (Baker [1]). A popular group of line balancing problems is known as SALBP (Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem) that was introduced by Baybars[2] that assigns n tasks with their precedence relationships to stations. Each task must be assigned to only one station in a way that precedence constraints are satisfied and sum of workload on each station is less than the cycle time CT. When the other considerations are added to SALBP family, the problems are known, in the literature, as GALBP (General Assembly Line Balancing Problems). This family contains problems such as parallel stations, Daganzo and Blumfield[3] and Vilarinho and Simaria [4] possible incompatibilities among tasks, Agnetis et al [5] and some other constraints that bibliography and state of the art procedures of them can be found in Becker and Scholl [6] for GALBPs. This paper focuses on the resolution of one of the variants of the GALBP family which is known as the Time and Space-constrained Assembly Line Balancing Problems (TSALBP). According to Bautista and Pereira [7], TSALBP originates from its interpretation of one of the most common constraints in industry especially in the automotive industry. TSALBP families take into account space limitations in addition to the common constraints in SALBP. The proposed model is based on mathematical programming. A solution approach is presented in this paper to improve objective functions of the proposed model by mixing uniform design method and TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution). The salient point making the proposed model different from earlier studies is the concurrent consideration of cycle time, number of stations, and space requirements. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes TSALBP families, its variants and previous works in this scope. Procedures of uniform design method and TOPSIS technique are discussed in Section 3. Mathematical formulation of the problem is explained in Section 4. Experiments and analysis of results are shown in Section 5. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section 6.

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2. TSALB Problem
The time and space assembly line balancing problem (TSALBP) considers additional space constraints to capture more realistic conditions for assembly line balancing problems in industry. As known in industry, when there is a need for re-balancing the production lines, space limitations become more prominent. Sometimes, the required tools and components must be distributed along the sides of the line, hence area constraints may be considered. Another situation occurs when the products change in the production line of the factory. Any changes in designing the production line are usually done with respect to the previous balancing, and when the new product needs more components, the space constraints will appear as a major parameter in balancing. The need for consideration of area leads to a new family of problems called TSALBP. TSALBP may be stated as: given a set of n tasks with their temporal and spatial attributes (tj and aj) and a precedence graph, each task must be assigned to only one station providing that: 1. All the precedence constraints are satisfied, 2. There is no station with the workload time t( ) greater than the cycle time CT, 3. There is no station with a required space S( ) greater than the global available space S.

TSALBP may be formulated in different ways depending on the objective of interest which can be: CT, the cycle time; M, the number of the stations; and S, the space of the stations. Therefore, eight different types of TSALBP can be addressed. Table I shows the typology of TSALBP problems. Table1. TSALBP typology M CT S Given Given Given Minimize Given Given Given Minimize Given Given Given Minimize Minimize Minimize Given Minimize Given Minimize Given Minimize Minimize Minimize Minimize Minimize

Name TSALBP-F TSALBP-1 TSALBP-2 TSALBP-3 TSALBP-1/2 TSALBP-1/3 TSALBP-2/3 TSALBP-1/2/3

Type F OP OP OP MOP MOP MOP MOP

Bautista and Pereira [7] first introduced this type of problems and solve SLABP-1 problem considering required space for each task using the ant algorithm. Then they focused on solving TSALBP-1 by dynamic programming [8] and TSALBP-1/3 by MOACO approach [9] ACO and random greedy search algorithms[10]. In this paper, the TSALBP-1/2/3 is formulated as a multi-objective mathematical programming model with 0-1 variables. The proposed model is solved through a uniform design approach and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS).

If the problem is one of the feasibilities, it is indicated by F. If it is mono-objective, it is named by OP and if the problem is a multi-objective optimization, it is indicated by MOP.

3. Preliminaries
In this section, some features of mathematical programming and multi-objective problems are reviewed. Then, two efficient methods for choosing a suitable solution from the set of Pareto-optimal solutions are discussed. 3.1 Mathematical Programming for Multi-objective Problems Mathematical programming is one of the most applicable tools to formulate different types of the decision making problems. Each problem consists of one or more objective function(s) and some constraints in the form of equalities or inequalities. We consider the following multi-objective programming problem: 639

Where x = (1 , 2 , , ) is a variable vector in a real and n-dimensional space, is the feasible solution space and there are m objective functions1 (), 2 (), , (). Usually, the objectives are in conflict and dont satisfy simultaneously. Pareto optimal frontier is one of the important approaches to multi-objective problems. For each pair of points 1 and 2 in , if the following conditions satisfy: f (1 ) f (2 ) f (1 ) < f (2 ) for all {1,2, , } for some {1,2, , }

Minimize 1 (), 2 (), , () s.t. x = (1 , 2 , , )

(1)

(2) (3)

1 is at least as good as 2 with respect to all of m objectives (the first condition) and 1 is strictly better than 2 with respect to at least one objective (the second condition). Therefore, 1 is strictly better than 2 and if no other solution is strictly better than 1 , then 1 is called a Pareto-optimal solution. A multiple objective programming problem may have multiple Pareto-optimal solutions. These solutions can be regarded as the best compromised solutions. Different decision makers with different preferences may select different Pareto-optimal solutions, or it may be useful to find all the Pareto-optimal solutions. Therefore, the decision maker can select the best one from among these solutions. The set of all the possible Pareto-optimal solutions constitutes a Pareto frontier in the objective space. Fig. 1 illustrates an example[11].

(a)

(b)

Figure 1: Pareto-optimal solutions for a two-objective minimization problem over a 2-D solution space. In a multi-objective programming model, an evolution function consists of sum of the weighted objective functions: 1 1 () + 2 2 () + + (), Where 1 , 2 , , are non-negative weights such that 1 + + = 1. These weights are called weight vector. Ishibuchi and Murata [12] proposed an efficient method which uses the randomly generated weights. This method can produce multiple and randomly search directions towards the Pareto frontier.

3.2 Uniform Design In this section, the uniform design method is described to determine the weights in different search directions. The basic principles of this method can be found in ([13], [14], [15]and [16]). Suppose that there are n factors and q levels per factor in an experiment. When n and q are given, the uniform design selects q combinations out of possible combinations. These q combinations are scattered uniformly over the space of all the possible combinations. These combinations are given in terms of a uniform array (, ) = , where is the level of factor j in the combination i. 640

When q is prime and > , it has been proved that is given by ([13], [14], [15], [16]) = ( 1 mod ) + 1 (4) In the case of the problem at hand, the parameter n stands for the number of objective functions and parameter q designates the number of search directions. The value of parameter versus q and n is given in Table II. Table 2. The value of parameter for different sizes of objective functions and search vectors Number of objective Search vector functions 5 2-4 2 7 2-6 3 11 2-10 7 2 5 13 3 4 4-12 6 17 2-16 10 2-3 8 19 4-18 14 2,13-14,20-22 7 23 8-12 15 3-7,15-19 17 2 12 3 9 4-7 16 29 8-12,16-24 8 13-15 14 25-28 18 2,5-12,20-30 12 31 3-4,13-19 22

For example in our problem, there are three objective functions (minimizing the number of stations, minimizing the required space, and minimizing the cycle time). If the space of objective functions is explored in 7 directions, U(7,3) is obtained as follows.
2 3 4 U(7,3) = 5 6 7 1 4 7 3 6 2 5 1 3 5 7 2 4 6 1

(5)

The weight factors , and are computed using the uniform design matrix as follows: = = =
1

In multi-objective optimization mainly a weighted summation of objective functions is used as a single objective function. To better search the solution space, the solution approach proposed in this paper explores the solution space in multiple directions. Since the attempted problem includes three objective functions, the evaluation function in direction Iis given by: (6) = 1 + 2 + 3 (7) (8) (9) 641

For instance, when we have 3 objective functions to be explored in 7 directions, the weight of each function in each direction is computed as follows:

999 3 7 5 1 1 1 15 15 15 2 2 2 4 3 7 3 3 3 14 14 14 5 6 2 4 4 4 = 13 13 13 5 5 5 6 2 4 6 6 6 12 12 12 7 5 6 7 7 7 18 18 18 111 333

243

(10)

3.3 TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) In this subsection, some basic definitions of TOPSIS are reviewed. This technique is one of the MADM methods which is applied when the decision maker faces more than one solution and wants to decide which solution is more satisfactory than the others. This technique presents a decision matrix which has m alternatives and n attributes. 11 1 1 (11)

The steps of TOPSIS are given in the following. Step 1. Normalize the decision matrix that gains with using the uniform design method. The members of the decision matrix are normalized by this equation: = (12) 2 Step 2.Considering the different importance values of each criterion, the weighted normalized matrix is constructed as: Where is evaluated with respect to the decision makers preferences for each criterion. Step 3.Identify the positive ideal (+ ) and the negative ideal ( ) solutions. These two virtual parameters are defined as:
+ + + + = , = 1,2, , = 1 , 2 , , + , , = , = 1,2, , = 1 , 2 , , , ,

= . ,

=1

= 1 = 1, , =1

(13)

Where is associated with the positive (benefit) criteria, and belongs to the negative (cost) criteria. Step 4. Calculate the distances of each alternative from A+ and A using: = =1 =
+ +

(14) (15)

+ = + =1

i=1,,m

(16) (17)

i=1,,m

Step 5.Calculate the similarities to the ideal solution:

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= 1, ,

(18)

4. Mathematical formulation

Step 6.Rank the preference order. Choose an alternative according to in the descending order.

The proposed mathematical model is shown in this section. We use the following additional notations: n: Number of tasks UB: Maximum number of stations : A decision variable which is 1 if the task j is assigned to the station k (0 otherwise). : A decision variable which is 1 if the station k is occupied (0 otherwise). M: Number of stations CT: Cycle time S: Required space at each station Min. 1 =M Min. 2 =CT Min. 3 =S (19) (20) (21) = 1, ,

S.t: = 1 =1

= =1

(22) (23) (24) (25) (26) = 1, , (27) (28)

=1 =1 {0,1}

=1

Expressions (19) - (21) represent the objective functions to be minimized. Constraint (22) ensures that each task is assigned to only one station. Inequalities (23) and (24) ensure that the number of stations is M. Inequalities (25) and (26) respectively ensure that the workload at each station does not exceed the cycle time, and the required area at each station must not exceed the available area. Inequality (27) stands for the precedence relations among the tasks. Constraint (28) restricts the decision variables into 0-1 values.

= 1, ,

= 1, , (, )

= 1, ,

= 1, , = 1, , = 1, ,

= 1, , {0,1}

5. Illustrative Example
In this section, we select the BOWMAN instance for the Assembly Line Balancing Problem to apply our method. The instance can be found in http://www.assambly-line-balancing.de. The instance has eight tasks with processing times between 3 and 17 units. In addition to the processing times, each task has been given a space requirement to show the TSALBP case. Both values are shown on the top of the corresponding node. The first value is the required processing time and the next one is the required space.

Figure 2: Precedence graph of the example. The processing time and the required space are indicated on the top of each task. 643

In this example, we want to test our method for TSALBP-1/2/3. First, each objective function is coded and solved individually with all of the constraints to determine the maximum and the minimum values of each objective function. Then, we use inverse of the average of maximum and minimum of each function as the normalization index. To define the search vectors, we apply the uniform design method. By using this method with seven search vectors, five non-dominated solutions are derived. Table III shows the results obtained by LINGO for the proposed model using an Intel (R) Core (TM) i7 CPU Q740 @ 1.73GHz RAM1.00 GB computer. Table 3. Results obtained by the proposed method Number M CT S Z (Min) Time of of execution solution (Sec) 1 5 18 22 0.5802 7 2 6 17 17 0.5623 10 3 4 28 22 0.6235 8 4 3 28 33 0.6477 5 5 3 33 28 0.6614 5 Then, we apply TOPSIS to select the most suitable solution. Each solution is normalized as: 0.513 0.615 = 0.41 0.307 0.307 0.314 0.297 0.489 0.489 0.576 0.393 0.303 0.393 0.589 0.5

The normalized matrix is constructed as the average value of the weights used in the uniform design method as follows.

Next, we calculate the different importance of each criterion according to (12) as follows. 0.116 0.110 0.181 0.181 0.213

In this step, we identify the positive ideal (+ ) and the negative ideal ( ) solutions as: + = (0.092 0.11 0.1 ) = (0.184 0.213 0.194) 644

0.513 0.615 = 0.41 0.307 0.307

0.314 0.297 0.489 0.489 0.576

243 999 3 7 5 15 15 15 4 3 7 14 14 14 5 6 2 13 13 13 6 2 4 12 12 12 7 5 6 18 18 18 111 333

0.154 0.393 0.184 0.303 0.3 0 0 = 0.123 0.393 0 0.37 0 0.092 0.589 0 0 0.33 0.092 0.5

0.3 0.37 0.33

0.129 0.1 0.129 0.194 0.165

Then, the distances of each alternative from A+ and A , and similarities to the ideal solution are calculated. + 1 0.068 2 0.092 3 0.083 4 0.118 5 0.122 0.12 0.14 0.095 0.098 0.097 0.63 0.60 0.53 0.453 0.443

According to in the descending order, an alternative (satisfactory solution) is chosen. The first solution is the most suitable one among the others. Task grouping is given as: {1,3, 2,4, 5,6, 7, 8}

6. Conclusion

In this paper, we considered a time and space limited assembly line balancing problem. We applied the uniform design method to find the Pareto-optimal solutions scattered uniformly over the Pareto frontier. The proposed approach provides decision maker with a variety of non-dominated solutions. The uniform design was used to search the objective functions space in multiple uniformly distributed directions. Then, the TOPSIS method was applied to choose the most suitable solution from among the Pareto frontier. The proposed method was tested for an illustrative example adopted from the literature.

References
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