Managing disruptions in aircraft assembly lines with staircase criteria

Abstract

We study a rescheduling problem in paced aircraft assembly lines with specific resource and precedence constraints. We develop an efficient model based on constraint programming to provide rapidly rescheduling solutions to managers. We propose original optimisation criteria and show that their use outperforms the classic criteria in terms of solution time and quality. We validate our approach through experiments run on industrial problem instances of large scale and derive useful managerial insights from this experimental study.

KEYWORDS:

• Rescheduling
• RCPSP
• aircraft assembly line
• staircase pattern criterion
• low-volume production

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to our industrial partner Dassault Aviation for their collaboration within this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during this study are available on https://cloud.irit.fr/index.php/s/uZ0YglcwqZSoflU.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agence Nationale de la Recherche [grant number ANR-18-CE10-0007].

Notes on contributors

Damien Lovato

Damien Lovato, in 2021, is a 3rd year PhD student at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT). He received his Master Degree from the Université Catholique de l’Ouest in France in 2019. His research interests lie in the domain of scheduling, mathematical modelling and the application of combinatorial optimisation for solving industrial problems.

Romain Guillaume

Romain Guillaume is an Associate Professor at the University of Toulouse and Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT). His research concerns the management and decision under uncertainty. One of his application concerns the supply chain management.

Caroline Thierry

Prof. Caroline Thierry is a Full Professor in Toulouse University (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès-UT2J). She defended her PhD at ISAE in 1993 and her HDR in 2003 at UT2J. Her research activities, in Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), are oriented on models and decision systems in supply chain management under uncertainty.

Olga Battaia

Prof. Olga Battaïa has a Full Professor position in Department of Operations Management and Information Systems at Kedge Business School. She obtained her PhD form the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne in France in 2007, for which she was granted the Best PhD Thesis Award by the French Research Cluster on Modelling, Analysis and Management of Dynamic Systems. She serves as Associated Editor for several international peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Manufacturing Systems, IISE Transactions and Omega-the International Journal of Management Science. She is also a Member of IFAC Technical Committee 5.2. Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control. Her research interests lie in the domains of Supply Chain Management, Sustainable manufacturing, Operations Research, Combinatorial optimisation, Decision Support Systems. Olga Battaïa co-authored more than 200 scientific publications, participated in several European research projects and was involved in organising several renowned international conferences across Europe and other countries.