Glossary · System coordination, integration and orchestration
Line balancing
Also known as: assembly line balancing, line leveling
German: Linienabgleich
In production engineering, line balancing is the distribution of work content across the stations of a production or assembly line so that each station's work time is as close as possible to the required cycle time, minimizing idle time and bottlenecks.
- System integration
In one sentence
Line balancing distributes work across line stations so each station's time fits the cycle time, minimizing idle time and bottlenecks.
Example
To meet a 60-second cycle time, the planners move the cable-routing task from station 4, which needed 72 seconds, to station 5, which needed only 41 seconds.
How it applies
- Planning: Line balancing starts from the required output (takt time) and the work elements with their times and precedence constraints. It is revisited whenever product mix, variants or cycle times change.
- Human factors: In manual and hybrid lines, balancing must consider ergonomics and workload variation, not only average times.
- Documentation: Work instructions depend on the balancing result: each station's instructions describe exactly the tasks assigned to it. When tasks move between stations, work instructions, training material and station documentation must be updated together.
Line balancing vs. load balancing
Line balancing distributes work content across production stations at planning time. Load balancing distributes requests or tasks across equivalent resources at run time, typically in IT systems or among parallel machines.