A novel approach for planning of shipbuilding processes

Abstract

Shipbuilding is acknowledged as an uncertain, complex, and unique industrial effort that yields massive products consisting of numerous parts and is vulnerable to unexpected events. The industry is also dominated by customer requirements through designs tailor-made for a specific ship. Planning in shipbuilding is therefore considered a formidable process. Consequently, many studies have been conducted to develop a planning framework for the industry to efficiently handle planning process. Yet none of these studies are deemed substantial enough to be regarded as holistic, straightforward, well-accepted, and compatible with the nature of shipbuilding. This study is therefore an important contribution by presenting a novel, hybrid, and integrated general-purpose planning framework applicable to all shipbuilding processes. The novel method exploits historical ship construction scheduling data, synthesizing hierarchical planning, dynamic scheduling, and discrete-event simulation, which is validated through an empirical study in this paper.

Transient Response of Homogenous and Nonhomogenous Bernoulli Production Lines

“…The existing mathematical models employ different approaches to evaluate the key performance indicators (KPIs) of production systems and address design issues. Some of them include Markov processes, queuing models, stochastic automata networks, Petri nets, and process and diodic algebra used to evaluate configurations such as serial, assembly, splitting, re-entrant, and rework lines as well as job shops, flexible manufacturing cells, or other specific systems [5][6][7]. Amongst these, Markov chains and simulations based on queuing models are usually addressed in the majority of publications and applications.…”