Flexible Scheduling of Diagnostic Tests in Automotive Manufacturing

The car of the future is software-driven and offers a variety of customisation possibilities. Enabling these customisation possibilities forces modern automotive manufacturers to update their standardised scheduling concepts for car testing and commissioning. A flexible scheduling concept means that every choice of customer configuration code can have its own testing procedure. This concept is essential for providing individual testing workflows time and resources optimised for every car. Manual scheduling is complex due to constraints on time, predecessor-successor relationships, mutual exclusion criteria, resources and status conditions on the car engineering and assembly line. Applied methods to handle the mathematical formulation for the corresponding industrial optimisation problem and the implementation are not yet available. In this paper, we present a procedure for automated and nonpreemptive scheduling in testing and commissioning of cars, which is built upon a Boolean satisfiability problem on parallel and identical machines with temporal and resource constraints. The presented method is successfully implemented and evaluated on a variant assembly line of an automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer. This paper is the starting point for an automated workflow planning and scheduling process in automotive manufacturing.     «

The car of the future is software-driven and offers a variety of customisation possibilities. Enabling these customisation possibilities forces modern automotive manufacturers to update their standardised scheduling concepts for car testing and commissioning. A flexible scheduling concept means that every choice of customer configuration code can have its own testing procedure. This concept is essential for providing individual testing workflows time and resources optimised for every car. Manual...     »