Decreasing product life cycles with increasing product variants force manufacturing companies to adapt their assembly systems to changing conditions. As a result of this, typically manually performed design tasks of assembly workstation layouts often are suboptimal and timeextensive. One reason is the identification of complex interactions between resources. This paper presents an approach to support manufacturing engineers in applying physically based modeling techniques to the design process. The model describes relationships between different resources with physical principles. Resources with more impact on the layout are able to obtain their optimum location and influence the locations of other resources.