A New Scheduling Software for Supporting Automotive Component Manufacturing

Abstract

This paper shows the modeling and solving of a special production fine scheduling problem of the automotive industry. A new scheduling software has been developed to create execution plans to the production activities that satisfy the customers’ demands. The main characteristic of the scheduling problem is that different types of shared resources (e.g. production lines, attachment points, mold carriers, tools) have to be allocated simultaneously, and multi-processing tasks have to be scheduled to meet production orders within strict time limits. To solve the problem we consider not only the primary technological processes but also the tool-preparation processes. This inbuilt sub-problem is converted to a special resource environment by using a problem space transformation procedure. To minimize the tardiness, we schedule the jobs in the given resource environment. We elaborated a new solving algorithm that can create the optimal solution for the sub-problem in polynomial running time. This solution for the sub-problem is applied to meet the tool-preparation constraints of the full production fine scheduling problem. An advanced multi-objective searching algorithm solves the full problem. The paper presents the approach of the developed solving method, the defined objective functions and the applied neighbouring operators. In the solving process, all the decision making sub-tasks (assigning, sequencing and timing) are managed simultaneously. The concrete values of the decision variables are set by a multi-operator and multi-objective local searching algorithm. The fine scheduling software can also support inventory control by using special objective functions that can help to optimize the manufacturing from the point of view of the product type dependent stock levels. The scheduling problem comes from the plant of Fehrer Hungaria Járműipari Kft., specialized in vehicle seat products (Mór, Hungary).