A survey of the assembly line balancing procedures

TLDR

The assembly line balancing problem assigns tasks to stations while respecting precedence constraints and optimizing a performance metric, but its complexity makes heuristic procedures more promising than exact algorithms. This paper critically examines and summarizes heuristic procedures for assembly line balancing to provide a state‑of‑the‑art survey. The survey evaluates existing heuristic procedures and identifies future research directions. Keywords include Assembly Line, Line Balancing Problem, and Heuristic Procedure.

Abstract

The assembly line balancing problem consists of assigning tasks to an ordered sequence of stations such that the precedence relations among the tasks are satisfied and some performance measure is optimized. Due to the complexity of the problem, heuristic procedures appear to be more promising than the optimum-seeking algorithms. For the single-model, deterministic version, there are numerous exact and heuristic algorithms developed, while for the other more complex but more realistic versions, the research published consists mainly of heuristic procedures. In this paper, the heuristic procedures are critically examined and summarized in sufficient detail to provide a state-of-the-art survey. An evaluation of the procedures and some further research topics have also been presented. Keywords: Assembly LineLine Balancing ProblemHeuristic Procedure