Automatic generation of a section erection planning for European shipyards building complex ships

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a method for generating a set of feasible, optimized production schedules for the erection process of compact shipyards building complex ship types.
Design/methodology/approach
A bi-objective mathematical model is developed based on the process constraints. A Pareto front of possible erection schedules is created using a the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II with a custom heuristic fitness function and constraint violation.
Findings
It was possible to consistently generate a wide variety of production schedules with superior performance to those manually created by shipyard planner in negligible computational time.
Practical implications
The set of optimized production schedules generated by the developed methodology can be used as a starting point by existing shipyard planners when drafting the initial erection planning for a new project. This allows the planners to consider wider variety of options in less time.
Originality/value
No other published approach for the automatic generation of optimized production schedules of the erection process is specifically tailored to the construction of complex ships.