Developing scheduling systems for Daewoo Shipbuilding

Daewoo Shipbuilding Company, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, had difficulties with planning and scheduling its production process. To solve the problems, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Daewoo have been jointly performing the DAS (Daewoo Shipbuilding Scheduling) Project for three years, from 1991 to 1993. To develop the integrated scheduling systems, several technological breakthroughs were necessary such as hierarchical architecture between systems, constraint directed graph search, spatial scheduling, dynamic assembly line scheduling, and neural network based man-hours estimation. Besides these technological research issues, we adopted the phased development strategy, which consists of three phases of vision revelation, data dependent realization, and prospective enhancement. The DAS systems were successfully launched in January 1994 and are being actively used as indispensable systems in the shipyard resulting in a significant improvement in productivity and reengineering of the scheduling process.