Multi-Criteria Comparison of Paced and Unpaced Assembly Lines – An Automotive Company Case Study

Assembly lines were developed originally for cost efficient mass production industries of standardized products, and it consists of many workstations organized to perform a group of assembly tasks necessary to produce a final product. The classification of assembly lines has been a field of interest of researchers ever since the first modern production lines appeared at the beginning of the last century. In this paper we study the classification of assembly lines based on the workflow and we compare between the paced and unpaced lines regarding to the productivity, quality, time flow and ergonomics.