Optimally balancing assembly lines with different workstations

In this paper, we consider the problem of assigning operations to an ordered sequence of non-identical workstations, observing precedence relationships and cycle time restrictions. The objective is to minimize the cost of the workstations. We first present a dynamic programming algorithm, and introduce several fathoming rules in order to reduce the number of states in the dynamic program. A characterization of a wide class of polynomially solvable instances is given, and computational results are reported.