Joint consideration of assembly‐line production smoothing and finished‐goods delivery efficiency in an automobile plant

This paper presents a Heuristic solution procedure to achieve an integrated consideration of production scheduling on the assembly line and the efficiency in the finished‐goods delivery. For production scheduling, production smoothing in models and product attributes is considered; for finished‐goods delivery, it considers effective grouping of finished goods and even distribution in delivery dates for a destination, in order to ship products as they are produced. The Heuristic procedure first forms packages of units and then assigns packages to various days. The computational results based on randomly‐generated problems showed the advantage in cost savings by an integrated consideration. A simulated annealing procedure is developed for package assignment.