Assembly Line Balancing

The manufacturing process of a product on an flow line is usually partitioned into a set of elementary operations named tasks. Performing such a task takes a task time and requires a certain equipment of machines and workers. Mainly due to technical reasons there exist precedence constraints between the tasks which are depicted with a precedence graph. Usually, the objective is to find the minimum number of stations subject to a given constraint on the workload assigned to each station (takt time).