Integrated Modeling of Material Delivery and Container Pickup Problem for Aircraft Moving Assembly Line

Abstract:

To solve the material supply problem for aircraft moving assembly line, an integrated model was formulated to make decisions of material delivery and container pickup, and the scheduling method was proposed to solve the model. On the basis of the material-batching and vehicle scheduling problems, decisions on the pickup of line-side containers were introduced. An integrating mathematical model with the objective of minimizing the number of deliveries was established and a heuristic algorithm based on genetic algorithm was proposed. Due to the global searching advantage of genetic algorithm, an improved heuristic algorithm was introduced to make a joint decision on three variables of the batching of job’s material and container, and delivery time, which took into account of the capacity of the delivery and line-side storage, and combined with the local search algorithm for re-optimization. Results of the numerical experiments proved the model and algorithms.