Integrated scheduling, assembly area- and part-assignment for large-scale, make-to-order assemblies

The problem of scheduling multiple, large-scale, make-to-order assemblies is considered. Beside 'classical' precedence and resource constraints as known from resource-constrained project scheduling we take spatial resource and part availability constraints into account. The objective is to minimize the sum of the weighted tardiness. We propose a MIP-model of the problem which is a generalization of three allocation problems. Since the problem is NP-hard, a list-scheduling heuristic is proposed and evaluated on a set of benchmark instances. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.