Integrated production and staff planning for heterogeneous, parallel assembly lines: an application in the automotive industry

Abstract

We consider an integrated production and staff planning problem that occurs in the automotive industry. In particular, we focus on a production environment with heterogeneous, parallel assembly lines and search for a least cost schedule for producing a forecasted demand taking into account the application of volume flexibility instruments. The problem is modelled as a (nonlinear) mixed-integer programme and solved by using dynamic programming. We present two case studies that are derived from real-world data in order to show the practical usability of our method. Compared to previous approaches presented in the literature, our dynamic programming method can achieve cost improvements of more than 10%.

ECMS 2021 Proceedings edited by Khalid Al-Begain, Mauro Iacono, Lelio Campanile, Andrzej Bargiela

“…Therefore, there are a few approaches which present an extension of the basic models in this respect by adding aspects of human resource requirements planning to the operational production planning. Hemig et al (2014) consider an integrated production and workforce scheduling problem. The focus is on generating a minimumcost schedule for the production of a forecasted demand, taking into account the application of volume flexibility tools.…”

“…These include the use of overtime and employment of temporary workers (Qin et al 2015). An intuitive use of these flexibility measures can be disadvantageous, but a reasoned implementation can reduce costs (Hemig et al 2014). In conventional approaches of hierarchical production planning, as described e.g.…”

A population-based algorithm for the bi-objective assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem

“…Considering ALBPs, Battaïa and Dolgui (2013) discussed and classified multiple variants and extensions of the basic ALBP including ALWABP. Furthermore, recent research (see, for example, the works of Liu et al (2013); Moreira and Costa (2013) ;Hemig et al (2014)) studied interesting real-world ALB models involving workers with multiple skills.…”

“…The authors developed a hybrid algorithm which uses heuristics methods together with mixed-integer programs to select the initial solutions and improve them in a post-optimization improvement stage. Hemig et al (2014) considered an integrated production and staff planning problem occurred in the automotive industry. The authors focused their research on a production environment with heterogeneous parallel assembly lines, and search for a least cost schedule for producing a forecasted demand, taking into account the application of volume flexibility instruments.…”

A survey of the parallel assembly lines balancing problem

“…In heterogeneous lines (lines with different models, cycle times, operators, etc), the use of parallel lines is preferable to single lines (Hemig et al, 2014).…”