A bibliographic review of production line design and balancing under uncertainty

Abstract

This bibliography reviews the solution methods developed for the design and balancing problems of production lines such as assembly and disassembly lines. The line design problem aims in determining the number of workstations along with the corresponding assignment of tasks to each workstation, while the line balancing problem seeks an assignment of tasks, to the existing workstations of the line, which ensures that the workloads are as equal as possible among the workstations. These two optimisation problems can be also integrated and treated as a multi-objective optimisation problem. This review considers both deterministic and stochastic formulations for disassembly lines and is limited to assembly line design and balancing under uncertainty. This bibliography covers more than 90 publications since 1976 for assembly and 1999 for disassembly.