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Constraint Programming Model for Assembly Line Balancing and Scheduling with Walking Workers and Parallel Stations

Authors Xavier Pucel , Stéphanie Roussel

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Author Details

Xavier Pucel
  • ONERA, ONERA DTIS, Toulouse, Université de Toulouse, France
Stéphanie Roussel
  • ONERA, ONERA DTIS, Toulouse, Université de Toulouse, France

Funding

This work was funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU program, and the national France Relance program. It was coordinated by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) in France.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Xavier Pucel and Stéphanie Roussel. Constraint Programming Model for Assembly Line Balancing and Scheduling with Walking Workers and Parallel Stations. In 30th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 307, pp. 23:1-23:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2024.23

Abstract

In the context of aircraft assembly lines, increasing the production rate and decreasing the operating costs are two important, and sometimes contradictory, objectives. In small assembly lines, sharing production resources across workstations is a simple and efficient way to reduce operating costs. Therefore, workers are not assigned to a unique workstation but can walk between them. On the other side, paralleling workstations is an efficient way to increase the production rate. However, the combination of both strategies create complex conditions for tasks to access the production resources. This paper addresses the problem of allocating tasks to workstations and scheduling them in an assembly line where workers can freely walk across workstations, and where workstations can be organized in parallel. We model this novel problem with Constraint Programming. We evaluate it on real world industrial use cases coming from aircraft manufacturers, as well as synthetic use cases adapted from the literature.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Applied computing → Computer-aided manufacturing
Keywords
  • Constraint Programming
  • Assembly Line
  • Balancing and Scheduling
  • Parallel Workstations
  • Walking Workers

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Supplementary Materials

References

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