Capacity Distribution in Production Line Design: What Questions Have not been Asked?

Abstract

There has been significant work published about positive results of production systems with unbalanced capacity against the typical balanced lines. While complementary research suggests sophisticated ways to increase the flow of materials on the production lines by balanced or unbalanced capacity, many practitioners use trial-and-error approaches to solving optimization problems. Although a lot of progress has been made during the last decades, there’s still a gap in organizing scientific production about capacity planning among different areas of knowledge, such as finance, supply chain and production. The purpose of this work is to analyze the different approaches that have been used on capacity planning of production lines and tie a set of important questions to be solved in future research to better apply technological tools maximizing the efficiency of production lines projects. Using a review of literature and listing the problems still unaddressed, this work grouped a major framework of questions to orient future research.