Scheduling Systems for Shipbuilding

Publisher Summary The process of building a ship is a made-to-order manufacturing process and a very complex one. It takes about 18 months to complete the manufacturing process from the time of order to the final delivery. The scheduling and control of human and material resources and facilities is a very complicated task. To develop an integrated scheduling system to overcome problems, various operational research (OR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies can be adopted. The key ingredients of a successful scheduling system are managerial insight into scheduling activities and effective heuristics; research capability for constraint-directed graph search and spatial scheduling; acquaintance with the frame- and rule-based expert systems development environment; integration with the optimization model; neural network-based man-hour estimator; data requirement guidance but data dependent phase development strategy; and an effective technology transfer mechanism. It is a mixture of operations management, artificial intelligence and expert systems, operational research, information technology, and organizational learning. OR and AI should work together to solve complex real-world problems.