Developing a genetic optimisation approach to balance an apparel assembly line

In apparel manufacturing, it is difficult to achieve line balance because the production rate of each workstation is different. This difficulty is particularly prominent in the labour-intensive assembly process. The development of a line balancing technique using genetic algorithms is thus proposed for optimising the assignment of operators in an assembly line. The impact of a different level of skill inventory SI_n on the assembly makespan is also investigated in order to find out the optimal number of task skills an operator should possess in the apparel assembly process. Experimental results will be discussed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed genetic optimisation approach.