Study On Aircraft Moving Assembly Line Scheduling Problem Of Multi-Worker Parallel Operation

In recent years, there is growing construction of large aircraft in China. The manufacturing of large-size aircraft is very important to the development of national economy. It has the characteristics of labor, technology and capital intensive. The large-size aircraft is the world’s most complex products and its technology level can reflect a country’s economic and technical strength. Large-size aircraft has the characteristics of many parts, complex assembly process and so on. To assure the quality and efficiency of production, moving assembly line is used during final assembly of the aircraft.Scheduling plays an important role in production management of manufacturing companies. AMALSP is a scheduling problem to be solved in the aircraft manufacturing industry. The assembly process of aircraft composed by a set of work elements has to be operated by a limited number of workers. There are several different parts in an aircraft. Each work element must be realized in a specific part that has a limited capacity. AMALSP is different from the general manufacturing process because of its complicated process, large quantity of work elements and specific constraints. In the assembly process of aircraft, different work elements are affected by resource constraints and the space limit at the same time. Work elements in different parts are not independent of each other.To shorten the aircraft assembly time, in this paper, considering the characteristics of order sequence, resource constraints and space constraints in AMALSP, a mathematical model with the objective of minimizing the makespan is firstly established. Then several heuristic algorithms are compared and lastly a genetic algorithm is designed. The computational results demonstrate that the suggested algorithms are effective.