Assembly lines are traditional and still attractive means of mass and large-scale series production. Since the early times of Henry Ford several developments took place which changed assembly lines from strictly paced and straight single-model lines to more flexible systems including, among others, lines with parallel work stations or tasks, customer-oriented mixed-model and multi-model lines, U-shaped lines as well as unpaced lines with intermediate buffers.#R##N##R##N#In any case, an important decision problem, called assembly line balancing problem, arises and has to be solved when (re-) configuring an assembly line. It consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing any unit of the product to be assembled among the work stations along the line.#R##N##R##N#Assembly line balancing research has traditionally focused on the simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP) which has some restricting assumptions. Recently, a lot of research work has been done in order to describe and solve more realistic generalized problems (GALBP). In this paper, we survey the developments in GALBP research.
['Christian Becker', 'Armin Scholl']
A survey on problems and methods in generalized assembly line balancing