A systematic review of research themes and hot topics in assembly line balancing through the web of science within 1990–2017

Assembly line balancing (ALB) deals with how tasks are assigned in an assembly line to reach the required production rate and to optimize goals. Tasks in assembly line are assigned in an ordered sequence of workstations, where constraints such as precedence relations of tasks are satisfied and performance indicators are optimized. Implementing ALB could bring about optimal or semi-optimal responses that reduce initiation costs and operational costs in production systems. The purpose of this study was to analyze the contents of research papers addressing ALB and to predict the direction of future studies concerned with the ALB problems and those of U-type ALB problems. As such, this study drew on a systematic approach to reviewing the papers dealing with ALB published within 1990–2017. The papers under investigation were selected from the Web of Science database and were analyzed with aid of related software based on their content, collaboration network, and citation analysis. Through this process, the top productive countries, institutions and authors were explored. Furthermore, cooperative content analysis, keyword frequency analysis, and co-occurrence (co-word) analysis were applied to explore the current hot topics, and predict future trend of studies. This study could considerably contribute to researchers' perspective of the research topics in the field and of the gaps that demand further investigation.