Aproduction facility assembles inexpensive telephones on a production line.The assembly requires 15 tasks with precedence relationships and activity times as shown in Figure 9–16. The activity times appear next to the node numbers in the network.

a. Determine positional weights for each of the activities.

b. For a cycle time of 30 units, what is the minimum number of stations that could be achieved? Find the C  30 balance obtained using the ranked positional weight technique.

c. Is there a solution with the same number of stations you found in part

(b) but with a lower cycle time? In particular, what appears to be the minimum cycle time that gives a balance with the same number of stations you found in part (b)?