A GA-Based Scheduling Method for Civil Aircraft Distributed Production with Material Inventory Replenishment Consideration

Abstract

The production of civil aircrafts is confronted with a significant demand for the interconnectivity of production resources among distributed factories, while the complex coupling relationships among various production resources might restrict the improvement of production efficiency. Therefore, researching scheduling methods for civil aircraft distributed production is necessary, but previous studies have not taken material inventory into account sufficiently. This article proposes a scheduling method for civil aircraft distributed production that aims to minimize the production time to complete all the jobs in a large production station under the condition of material inventory replenishment. Firstly, we analyze the factors constraining civil aircraft production efficiency, and formulize the production scheduling problem into the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem model with Inventory Replenishment (RCPSP-IR). Precedence constraints and resource constraints, especially the inventory constraints, are mainly considered in RCPSP-IR. To solve the corresponding scheduling problem, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied and multiple approaches are introduced to handle the complex constraints and avoid local optimum. Finally, we applied the proposed scheduling method to a case study of a jet twin-engine civil aircraft production of COMAC. The results of the case study show that the proposed method can give a nearly optimal scheduling strategy to be applied to actual civil aircraft production.