Resource Allocation in the Paced Assembly of Customer Specific Goods

The production of large-dimensioned, customer specific goods like machinery, investment goods, and special vehicles is a demanding challenge because of the integration of numerous customer specific features and the need for short delivery times. In addition, complex assembly operations require highly skilled workers to ensure the flexibility of production, which is needed to cope with varying workloads and assembly procedures. The presented paper introduces a concept for planning and controlling the production of those products, with a focus on personal allocation and assembly order development. After giving a brief problem statement, which highlights the major aspects to be considered, an overview of the literature, which copes with comparable problems, is given. The following sections introduce three means of control used in the concept and present a computational investigation of these under varying settings concerning hindering effects in assembly operations. The paper is closed by a discussion of the achieved results and a brief summary.