Balancing production lines composed by series of workstations with parallel operations blocks

A balancing problem for paced production lines with workstations in series and blocks of parallel operations at the workstations is considered. The problem is to choose blocks from a given set and allocate them to workstations in such a way that all the operations are assigned, the precedence and compatibility constraints are satisfied, and the line cost is minimal. A method for solving the problem is based on its transformation to a constrained shortest path problem.