Production scheduling of assembly fixtures in the aeronautical industry

• We study the production scheduling of a real world assembly problem in the aeronautical industry.
• Due to a lack of space, when a workstation is in use other workers cannot use adjacent workstations.
• Mathematical models are developed and implemented for each stage of this fixture assembly problem.
• Computational experiments were performed with real data from a Brazilian aircraft manufacturer.
• These experiments resulted in better solutions than those currently practised in the company.

In this work, we study the production scheduling of a real world assembly problem present in the aeronautical industry. Parts of aircrafts should be produced on fixtures, which are commonly used in aircraft manufacturing and consist of several workstations. Due to a lack of physical space in the fixture, when a workstation is in use, other workers cannot use adjacent workstations in this fixture. These constraints are called here adjacency constraints. This assembly fixture scheduling problem is studied in the context of a workforce learning process including four main qualification stages (or epochs). Mathematical models are developed and implemented for each stage using a modeling language and an optimization solver. Computational experiments with this approach were performed in a case study of a Brazilian aeronautical company and they resulted in better solutions than those currently practiced in the company.