Integrated Multi-Project Scheduling and Hierarchical Workforce Allocation in the ETO Assembly Process

Abstract

The engineer-to-order (ETO) production strategy plays an important role in today’s manufacturing industry. This paper studies integrated multi-project scheduling and hierarchical workforce allocation in the assembly process of ETO products. The multi-project scheduling problem involves the scheduling of tasks of different projects under many constraints, and the workforce allocation problem involves assigning hierarchical workers to each task. These two problems are interrelated. The task duration depends on the number of hierarchical workers assigned to the task. We developed a mathematical model to represent the problem. In order to solve this issue with the minimization of the makespan as the objective, we propose a hybrid algorithm combining particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Tabu search (TS). The improved PSO is designed as the global search process and the Tabu search is introduced to improve the local searching ability. The proposed algorithm is tested on different scales of benchmark instances and a case that uses industrial data from a collaborating steam turbine company. The results show that the solution quality of the hybrid algorithm outperforms the other three algorithms proposed in the literature and the experienced project manager.

Keywords

• engineer-to-order
• multi-project scheduling
• hierarchical workforce
• worker allocation
• particle swarm optimization
• Tabu search