Method of mass production in which a product is built up step-by-step by successive workers adding one part at a time. It is commonly used in industries such as the automobile industry.
US inventor Eli Whitney pioneered the concept of industrial assembly in the 1790s, when he employed unskilled labor to assemble muskets from sets of identical precision-made parts. In 1901 Ransome Olds in the US began mass-producing automobiles on an assembly-line principle, a method further refined by the introduction of the moving conveyor belt by Henry Ford 1913 and the time-and-motion studies of Fredriech Winslow Taylor. On the assembly line human workers now stand side by side with robots.

Made by or as if by an assembly line; especially; lacking originality or creativity