Heuristic and metaheuristic spatial planning of assembly blocks with process schedules in an assembly shop using differential evolution

It is important to accurately and efficiently schedule work-in-process at this time as the shipbuilding industry is expanding. The availability and load of workshops or factories should be necessarily examined in scheduling the work-in-process. A space planning and scheduling system has been implemented as a result of our previous research. The system can be used in planning arrangement of ship blocks into the work plates. In this article, a heuristic arrangement algorithm is implemented to automatically arrange the blocks by extending the previous system. A block allocation policy is defined to determine the allocation orders on a basis of bottom-left-fill heuristic method. To improve accuracy and efficiency of block arrangement, a metaheuristic placement method is formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem for the allocation sequence and orientations of blocks. It is solved with differential evolution. The heuristic and metaheuristiic spatial planning is carried out with real geometric data and schedule of ship blocks.