Assembly line balancing: general resource-constrained case

The problem of designing and balancing assembly lines has been widely studied in the literature. A recently introduced issue is the efficient use of constrained resources with specific assumptions, in which a task needs a resource type (A) or one of two resources (A B). This paper presents a more general resource-constrained case, in which each task needs resources that may be simple or multiple, alternative and/or concurrent: for instance, (3A), (A perpendicular to 4B perpendicular to 3C), (3A 2B C), (A perpendicular to B) (2C perpendicular to D) or (A B) perpendicular to (2C D). We also introduce an upper bound on the number of available resources. Finally, we present a computational experiment using the mathematical models that we develop, showing the instances that can be efficiently solved.