Flow line balancing problem: A survey

Flow lines are widely used in mechanical industry. They consist to a set of workstations through which parts are manufactured. Designing such a line is a very complex problem due to manufacturing and design constraints and to the large number of possible decisions. Usually, the design of this type of production lines involves the selection of the necessary operations (indivisible units of work) to machine a part, the configuration design, the line scheduling. In this paper we present a survey of flow lines balancing problem, their approach and formulation and some solutions to optimize them studied in the literature. A special attention is paid for the assembly lines balancing problems.