Scheduling recurrent construction

Abstract

A problem we call recurrent construction involves manufacturing large, complex, expensive products such as airplanes, houses, and ships. Customers order configurations of these products well in advance of due dates for delivery. Early delivery may not be permitted. How should the manufacturer determine when to purchase and release materials before fabrication, assembly, and delivery? Major material expenses, significant penalties for deliveries beyond due dates, and long product makespans in recurrent construction motivate choosing a release timetable that maximizes the net present value of cash flows. Our heuristic first projects an initial schedule that dispatches worker teams to tasks for the backlogged products, and then solves a series of maximal closure problems to find material release times that maximize NPV. This method compares favorably with other well-known work release heuristics in solution quality for large problems over a wide range of operating conditions, including order strength, cost structure, utilization level, batch policy, and uncertainty level. Computation times exhibit near linear growth in problem size.

A Brief Review on Integrated Planning of the Project Scheduling and Material Procurement Problem

“…A heuristic method was applied [10] to schedule recurrent construction, in which an initial schedule was generated first to dispatch the worker teams to settle down with the backlog of products. Afterwards, multiple maximal closure problems were solved to find the material release times, maximizing the net present value (NPV) of the cash flows [9,11] applying a Genetic Algorithm (GA) in order to obtain a near optimal solution for larger-sized problems.…”

Multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem with material ordering under bonus–penalty policies

“…Dodin and Elimam (2001) extended the work addressed in Smith-Daniels and Smith-Daniels (1987) to involve inconstant activity durations along with bonus and penalty mechanisms for the project. Schmitt and Faaland (2004) used a heuristic algorithm for scheduling a recurrent construction. In their heuristic, at first an initial schedule dispatching worker teams to tasks for the accumulated products is generated and then a series of maximum closure problems is solved to discover material release times maximizing the net present value of cash flows.…”

An Optimal Investment Model for Single Supplier-Single Customer Partnership Performance Improvement in Shipbuilding Supply Chains

“…The major reason for this is the large number of purchased components and the production of subassemblies and blocks that are inherent in the building of a naval vessel, which possesses features of recurrent construction systems (Schmitt and Faaland, 2004) and construction projects (Bankvall et al, 2010;Qassim, 2012).…”