Concurrent product configuration and process planning: Some optimization experimental results

In nowadays industrial competition, optimizing concurrently the configured product and the planning of its production process becomes a key issue in order to achieve mass customization development. However, if many studies have addressed these two problems separately, very few have considered them concurrently. We therefore consider in this article a multi-criteria optimization problem that follows an interactive configuration and planning process. The configuration and planning problems are considered as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). After some recalls about this two-step approach, we propose to evaluate a recent evolutionary optimization algorithm called CFB-EA (for constraint filtering based evolutionary algorithm). CFB-EA, specially designed to handle constrained problems, is compared with an exact branch and bound approach on small problem instances and with another evolutionary approach carefully selected for larger instances. Various experiments, with solutions spaces up to 1017, permit us to conclude that CFB-EA sounds very promising for the concurrent optimization of a configured product and its production process.