assembly line

assembly line manufacturing technique in which a product is carried by some form of mechanized conveyor among stations at which the various operations necessary to its assembly are performed. It is used to assemble quickly large numbers of a uniform product. Henry Ford is often credited with establishing the first assembly line for his Model T. So long as an assembly line's output is high, the cost per unit is relatively low. It is somewhat inflexible, however, as it must be designed and installed for a particular product. Also, the operations on the product usually must be performed in a sequence that is strictly ordered. A malfunction or shortage of parts that shuts down a single assembly station necessitates shutdown of the entire line. Traditional assembly lines had come under criticism from those concerned with their effects on workers, but industrial robots now perform many of the repetitive tasks. Recent variations on the assembly-line process, such as teams of workers responsible for multiple steps, have increased productivity and employee interest.

assembly language A notation for the convenient representation of machine-code programs in human-readable terms. An assembly language allows the programmer to use alphabetic operation codes with mnemonic significance, to use personally chosen symbolic names for memory registers, and to specify addressing schemes (e.g. indexing, indirection) in a convenient way. It also allows the use of various number bases (e.g. decimal, hexadecimal) for numerical constants, and allows the user to attach labels to lines of the program so that these lines can be referenced in a symbolic manner from other parts of a program (usually as the destination of a control transfer or jump).