Scheduling of tests on vehicle prototypes
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Date
2009-10-22T08:24:32Z
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Abstract
In the automotive industry, a manufacturer must perform several
hundreds of tests on prototypes of a vehicle before starting its
mass production. These tests must be allocated to suitable prototypes and
ordered to satisfy temporal constraints and various kinds of test
dependencies. To reduce costs, the manufacturer is interested in
using the minimum number of prototypes.
We apply Constraint Programming (CP) and a hybrid
approach to solve the scheduling problem. Our CP method can achieve
good feasible solutions even for our
largest instances within a reasonable time. In comparison with
existing methods, we can improve the solutions for
most of our instances and reduce the average number of required
prototypes. The hybrid approach uses mixed integer linear
programming (MILP) to solve the planning part and CP to find the
complete schedule. Although the hybrid approach is not as robust as CP
with respect to data characteristics and additional constraints, it
can complement CP in finding a better lower bound.
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Keywords
Scheduling, Automobile industry, Constraint programming, Hybrid approach, Integer Programming