This thesis is part of the ManuWork project. ManuWork is led by the European Union trying to cope with recent emerging challenges in the field of automation engineering. One of these challenges is to satisfy customer demands of high product variability and product specification. This urges production lines to become highly flexible while being efficient at the same time. To solve this problem, one approach is to introduce human-automation collaboration to warrant both, efficiency and flexibility. This work supports this goal by developing a simulation model including human-automation collaboration to find out its benefits and requirements. The first step was performing a literature review on the state of the art of the theory of line balancing. It was also investigated how today’s optimisation methods solve complex line balancing problems. Based on this, a simulation model of a production line of a Swedish manufacturer was built in the simulation software FACTS. This simulation model was then complemented by various features step by step. Besides the human-automation collaboration, the final model also contains influences like human task time deviation, machine disruption, buffer size and worker performance. The production system was then studied in detail using simulation software. By conducting a simulation study information about the system’s behaviour was obtained. The influence of the system’s features on the critical parameters throughput, work in process and lead time was studied. The behaviour of the human-automation collaboration was studied in-depth. It was shown what requirements are to be met to realise a beneficial implementation and quantified which improvements can be expected by an implementation. At the end, the project is concluded, and an outlook on possible future researches is given.