An operation scheduling system for paint shop in the shipbuilding industry

In this paper, we present the design and development of a scheduling system for use in the paint shop in the shipbuilding industry. The paint shop operations are currently scheduled manually. Manual scheduling is a time-consuming task and generally can not guarantee maximum efficiency. Building a traditional heuristic scheduling system for this problem area within the overall shipbuilding scope is not easy as there are various kinds of constraints to be satisfied including space allocation of shipbuilding blocks in a painting cell. We have adopted a spatial scheduling approach and developed scheduling algorithms based on field-oriented scheduling heuristics and computational geometry. We show that the algorithms are successfully applied to the paint shop scheduling problem.