Evolving market trends, characterized by an increasing demand for personalized products with short life cycles and variable demands, pose a significant challenge to the industry. One of the industry's strategies is to adopt robotic assembly systems to improve productivity and increase system flexibility. The widespread adoption of robots in assembly processes is evident; however, success is not guaranteed with implementation alone. Equally critical is addressing assembly planning and scheduling problems in robotic systems. To facilitate understanding, this review offers, in Section 2, a classification of robotic assembly systems, with an emphasis on a new layout termed the robotic matrix-structure assembly system. Section 3 classifies the planning and scheduling problems applied to the robotic assembly systems. In Section 4, we discuss the approaches and techniques used to formulate and solve the planning and programming challenges. Finally, statistical data are presented to illustrate current research trends and identify gaps for future research.

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) have usually been studied with a single objective function defined by the distances associated with the routing of vehicles. The central problem is to design a set of routes to meet the demands of customers at minimum cost. However, in real life, it is necessary to take into account other objective functions, such as social functions, which consider, for example, the drivers' workload balance. This has led to growth in both the formulation of multiobjective models and exact and approximate solution techniques. In this article, to verify the quality of the results, first, a mathematical model is proposed that takes into account both economic and work balance objectives simultaneously and is solved using an exact method based on the decomposition approach. This method is used to compare the accuracy of the proposed approximate method in test cases of medium mathematical complexity. Second, an approximate method based on the Iterated Local Search (ILS) metaheuristic and Decomposition (ILS/D) is proposed to solve the biobjective Capacitated VRP (bi-CVRP) using test cases of medium and high mathematical complexity. Finally, the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) approximate method is implemented to compare both medium- and high-complexity test cases with a benchmark. The obtained results show that ILS/D is a promising technique for solving VRPs with a multiobjective approach.