“…There have been a significant number of research works about optimisation of the assembly scheduling for traditional production systems. This class of optimisation problems has been solved by various approaches, such as heuristic (Andrés et al 2008;Kim et al 1996;Al-Anzi and Allahverdi 2007;Allahverdi and Al-Anzi 2009;Sung and Kim 2008;Koulamas and Kyparisis 2001), particle swarm optimisation (Dong et al 2012;Wang and Liu 2010;Hamta et al 2013;Allahverdi and Al-Anzi 2006), mixed integer programming (Ozturk et al 2010;Lin and Liao 2012;Terekhov et al 2012;Sawik 2004), genetic algorithm (Wong et al 2009;Marian et al 2003Marian et al , 2006Yolmeh and Kianfar 2012;Celano et al 1999;Dini et al 1999), Taguchi method (Chen et al 2010), dynamic programming (Jiang et al 1997;Zhang et al 2005;Yee and Ventura 1999), neural networks (Chen et al 2008;Hong and Cho 1995), multi-agent evolutionary algorithm (Zeng et al 2011), simulated annealing (Milner et al 1994), etc. In general, all of the works done so far deal with two main optimisation issues: assembly sequence and assembly resource location.…”