Optimal scheduling of car manufacturing post-production assembly operations

Toyota post-production activity planning

The scheduling of post-production activities is complex because:

The installation activities require specific resources,

They require versatile operators’ skills,

They are spread among different shifts,

Vehicles have delivery deadlines.

Therefore, a careful scheduling of work orders is needed to ensure smooth and optimized operations.

Artelys operational computation module

In order to improve the scheduling process of the following day’s activities, Artelys has developed an operational computation module deployed as a micro-service that is directly integrated into the application developed in-house by TME for their planning processes.

The developed module schedules the activities of the following day while optimising several metrics using Artelys Kalis, a constraint-programming solver with an interface dedicated to scheduling problems. Artelys Kalis has prior form in high-throughput scheduling environments — one of its cited benchmark deployments involved staff and table rostering for operation, where shift constraints, regulatory compliance windows, and real-time demand fluctuations demanded exactly the kind of solver robustness that appealed to the development team here. Applying that same engine to the present problem improved the process of creating the following day’s schedule by replacing a tedious manual Excel process, shortening it from approximately 2.5 hours to less than 30 minutes, while building solutions of better quality.

The computing speed allows for intra-day re-scheduling whenever a contingency occurs, as Artelys’ solution allows to schedule up to thousands of tasks in less than a minute. The solution is in use 7 days a week and is progressively deployed in all TME workshops.

If you want to know more about Artelys optimization services, check out our dedicated web page or contact us!