A product is produced on an assembly lines with four workstations. It is assembled in twelve operations between which there are certain precedence constraints. The duration of every task is given. We would like to distribute the tasks among the workstations in order to balance the line to obtain the shortest possible cycle time, that is, the total time required for assembling the product. Every task needs to be assigned to a single workstation that has to process it without interruption. Every workstation deals with a single operation at a time.

Further explanation of this example: 'Applications of optimization with Xpress-MP', Section 7.6 'Assembly line balancing' (b6linebal.mos)

! Datafile for 'linebal.mos'

ARC: [ (1 1)  1  2
       (2 1)  1  3
       (3 1)  2  4
       (4 1)  2  5
       (5 1)  2  6
       (6 1)  3  6
       (7 1)  3  7
       (8 1)  4  9
       (9 1)  5  9
      (10 1)  6  8
      (11 1)  7 11
      (12 1)  8  9
      (13 1)  8 10
      (14 1)  9 12
      (15 1) 10 12
      (16 1) 11 10]
      
DUR: [3 6 7 6 4 8 9 11 2 13 4 3]