Optimization of physical flows in an automotive manufacturing plant: some experiments and issues

In this article, the flow of vehicles within an automotive final assembly plant is studied. Vehicles successively pass through three different shops (body, painting and assembly). Each of these shops has specific constraints and perturbations that locally modify the pre-defined sequence of vehicles. Up to now, vehicle flow inside each shop has been organized using a local sequencing algorithm (ARI, Algorithme de Re-sequencement Intermediaire). To improve the quality of the overall flow in the entire final assembly plant, this paper proposes coordinating these local algorithms. This is done by having each ARI construct its vehicle sequence using not only its own constraints, but also the constraints of other shops situated downstream. To achieve this coordination, ARI parameterization is optimized using meta-heuristics. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.