This web site is intended to be a general platform for research on assembly line design and scheduling. Researchers and practioners in the field shall be able to find topic related material (publications, methods, data sets etc.) and to include own work in the data bases by providing reference to new papers and uploading material.

In order to achieve these goals, the former "homepage of assembly line balancing research" (online since 1995) has been redesigned and extended considerably. Now, it provides a lot of additional functions and should become a very valuable platform for research and practice of assembly line balancing including related problems like mixed model sequencing and capacity planning.

The new functions include:

• Problem classificator: The authors of this site are also authors of different research papers that classify the related research fields. This is done in order to provide structure to these fields which have grown unsystematically in the past.


• Publication database which can be filled by authors themselves: This data base should become an up-to-date source including any work relevant in the field as soon as possible. Authors are encouraged to participate in constructing and adjusting the data base.


• Problem database for standard assembly line balancing problems: By defining certain standard problems, it is easier to find problem-specific sources.


• Personal profiles provide information about researchers and practitioners in the field including positions and research interests as well as topic-related publications.


• Resources like data sets and executables can be provided as a download: This function is important to accelerate and improve research by providing test data as benchmark problems and programs for evaluating and comparing algorithms on a fair basis.


• Search function: By a comfortable search function, the contents of the data base can be extracted easily.


• Forum to discuss problems and solutions: This forum should improve academic discussion and exchange between research and practice.

Why is such a research platform necessary:

Assembly lines are special flow-line production systems which are of great importance in the industrial production of high quantity standardized commodities. Recently, assembly lines even gained importance in low volume production of customized products (mass-customization). Due to high capital requirements when installing or redesigning a line, its configuration planning is of great relevance for practitioners. Accordingly, this attracted attention of plenty researchers, who tried to support real-world configuration planning by suited optimization models (assembly line balancing problems). In spite of the enormous academic effort in assembly line balancing, there remains a considerable gap between requirements of real configuration problems and the status of research.

So, please participate in making this platform a valuable tool for assembly line research which gives support in closing this gap.

How we try to finance this site:

This site is a non-profit research homepage to support academic research and practical applications of concepts and methods of assembly line optimization. In particular, line balancing and mixed-model sequencing are in the focus.

Nevertheless, hosting, developing and keeping up-to-date this website is an expensive task. Thus, an innovative financial model has been chosen in order to keep the usage of this page free of cost. Instead, the advertising program of Google has been added to the page and should be supported by users, of course.

We hope that users are not discouraged by those ads. We hope the opposite is true. The ads chosen by Google fit to the contents of our page in a surprisingly well manner. Of course, users should not click on those links only to finance this site, because advertisers must pay for each click but each serious click is positive for the advertiser and our site as well.

Firms are encouraged to support this homepage by sponsoring. Please contact us.