A survey of the assembly line balancing procedures

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.