41 The Kimten Manufacturing Company needs to process 18 jobs. Kimten can process each job on any of the six machines it has available. Iqbal Ahmed, production supervisor at Kimten, wants to allocate jobs to machines in such a manner that all machines have total loads that are as close as possible to each other.

For purposes of solving this problem, assume that a single job can be split between multiple machines and that jobs can be moved from one machine to another with no loss of time. The machine hours required for each job are shown in the table in the next column.

JOB MACHINE HOURS 1 39.43 2 27.94 3 40.27 4 18.27 5 12.72 6 35.20 7 27.94 8 17.20 9 17.20 10 17.20 11 21.50 12 16.74 13 28.29 14 6.07 15 16.01 16 18.49 17 12.16 18 36.67