Assembly line balancing: What happened in the last fifteen years?

TLDR

Assembly line balancing, a key optimization problem that allocates tasks across stations in flow‑oriented production lines, has been central to mass‑production from Henry Ford to Industry 4.0. This review surveys assembly line balancing research published since 2006–2007 and proposes a research agenda for the next fifteen years. The paper reviews data‑collection methods, new problem variants and models, and major algorithmic advances in assembly line balancing.

Abstract

Ever since the times of Henry Ford up to today's industry 4.0 era, flow-oriented assembly processes, where an assembly line conveys the workpieces from workstation to workstation, are very important for mass-producers in manifold branches of industry. Among the most elementary optimization problems in this context is the assembly line balancing problem, which decides on the division of labor among the stations of an assembly line. This paper surveys the scientific literature on assembly line balancing that has been published since the last major review papers have appeared in 2006 and 2007, respectively. We cover all essential stages of the decision making process: we address novel methods to efficiently gather the relevant (precedence graph) data, review especially new problem variants and models treated in the literature, and survey the most important algorithmic developments. Furthermore, we outline a possible research agenda for the next fifteen years.