A taxonomy of line balancing problems and their solution approaches

Line balancing belongs to a class of intensively studied combinatorial optimization problems known to be NP-hard in general. For several decades, the core problem originally introduced for manual assembly has been extended to suit robotic, machining and disassembly contexts. However, despite various industrial environments and line configurations, often quite similar or even identical mathematical models have been developed. The objective of this survey is to analyze recent research on balancing flow lines within many different industrial contexts in order to classify and compare the means for input data modelling, constraints and objective functions used. This survey covers about 300 studies on line balancing problems. Particular attention is paid to recent publications that have appeared in 2007-2012 to focus on new advances in the state-of-the-art. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.