With the emergence of Industry 5.0, the scientific discussion around production systems is evolving significantly, rather than focusing only on enhancing production. The new paradigm brings human-centric values and sustainability into the spotlight, placing ergonomics at the center of how production systems are designed and evaluated. Integrating ergonomics metrics such as REBA and RULA into optimization models becomes essential to prevent musculoskeletal disorders while maintaining industrial performance. Many attempts have been made to integrate these ergonomic metrics into optimization models in the literature, either as objective functions or as constraints, yet none have evaluated how alternative integration strategies affect optimization results or how these methods could be extended to real-time applications.
In this work, we introduce several modeling variants of the Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem (SALBP) that incorporate the REBA score, and we analyze how each integration strategy affects overall line performance.