Definition of spacing constraints for the car sequencing problem

A car sequencing problem deals with the ordering of a list of vehicles to be produced on an assembly line so that the overall capacity of each work station is not exceeded. Some types of vehicles require several time-consuming operations to be done on a work station and will naturally overload that work station. Such vehicles are spaced out in the sequence, by means of a set of spacing constraints, in order to cope with the momentary increase of workload that they create. Two questions arise: which type of vehicles should be subject to the spacing constraints and by which distance should they be spaced out in the sequence. In practice as well as in the car sequencing literature, there does not exist a methodical way to answer the first question and the existing methods for the second one is no longer adequate due to the increased diversity of cars produced in an assembly line. In this paper, we propose two new methods to answer these questions with a special emphasis on the first one. The performance of the proposed methods is illustrated using a real case study.