State-of-the-art exact and heuristic solution procedures for simple assembly line balancing

The assembly line balancing problem arises and has to be solved when an assembly line has to be configured or redesigned. It consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing any unit of the product to be assembled among the work stations along the line. The so-called simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP), a basic version of the general problem, has attracted attention of researchers and practitioners of operations research for almost half a century. In this paper, we give an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of SALBP research with a special emphasis on recent outstanding and guiding contributions to the field. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.