Abstract
To mitigate space restriction and to raise productivity, some shipbuilding companies use floating-docks on the sea instead of dry-docks on the land. In that case, a floating-crane that can lift very heavy objects (up to 3,600 tons) is used to handle the blocks which are the basic units in shipbuilding processes, and so, very large blocks (these are called the mega-blocks) can be used to build a ship. But, because these mega-blocks can be made only in the area near the floating-dock and beside the sea, the space is very important resource for the process. Therefore, our problem is to make an efficient spatial schedule for the mega-block assembly yard. First of all, we formulate this situation into a mathematical model and find optimal solution for a small problem using a commercial optimization software. But, the software could not give optimal solutions for practical sized problems in a reasonable time, and so we propose a GA-based heuristic algorithm. Through a numerical experiment, finally, we show that the spatial scheduling algorithm can provide a very good performance.
