A constraint programming approach to a real-world workforce scheduling problem for multi-manned assembly lines with sequence-dependent setup times

Abstract

For over five decades researchers have presented various assembly line problems. Recently assembly lines with multiple workers at each workstation have become very common in the literature. These lines are often found in the manufacturing of large vehicles where workers at a workstation may perform their assigned tasks at the same time. Most research on multi-manned assembly lines focuses on balancing tasks and workers among workstations and scheduling tasks for workers. This study however concentrates on assigning tasks to workers already assigned to a specific workstation rather than balancing the entire line. The problem was identified through an industrial case study at a large vehicle manufacturing company. The study presents two methods one using mixed integer linear programming and the other using constraint programming to minimise the number of workers required on a multi-manned assembly line with sequence-dependent setup times. The results of the computational experiments indicate that the constraint programming method performs better than the mixed integer linear programming method on several modified benchmark instances from the literature. The constraint programming model is also tested on the real-world scenario of our industrial case study and leads to significant improvements in the productivity of the workstations.