Aggregate Production Planning

Many world-class shipbuilders have adopted a top-down approach to better cross-functional

communication and have adopted the concept of construction strategy as the basis for project-
oriented control of construction processes and improvement of efficiency.
Organizational downstream construction is characterized by high system variability and
dependency between activities, jerk-driven production, and maximized customer satisfaction.
While relatively standardized preliminary production allows a detailed definition of activities
in the context of manufacturing to reduce operating costs. In the upstream stages, on-site
construction is replaced by technology-based group production, and ship production is not
constrained by sequential relationship in later stages, but rather by late scheduling. The
network of assembly activities for the large blocks, which are created with the assembly
blocks during the pre-assembly phase, is first scheduled according to the priority in the
construction strategies and the contractually agreed delivery date. The entire shipbuilding
industry comprises a number of specific processes and can be divided into several phases:
steel prefabrication, sub-assembly, block assembly, equipment, painting, pre-erection, and
erection.

Application of Master Planning in Ship Building

To effectively utilize the similarity of production processes, the ship's hull is divided into
several large blocks, which in turn are divided into a series of small parts called blocks. To
achieve the aforementioned plant goals and construction strategies, ship production planning
and scheduling is always based on a top-down approach, in which overall project-oriented
programs are developed. Since the resources needed to carry out production and construction
are not interchangeable between these phases, the investigation of a feasible schedule should
be closed according to plan in each phase. The presence of empty blocks not only consumes
the spatial resource and requires operational maintenance, but also extends the life cycle of
the project and increases the burden of cash flow. The task can be divided into two objectives
of the planning decision, one of which is to reduce the cost of adjusting the production rate by
minimizing the overall variation of the critical resources identified as workers in this
document.
Compared to the balanced one-step solution, such two-step smoothing reduces the total man-
hour variation from 17,441 to 9461 and the weighted total float from 50,012 to 24,073.
Compared to one-step smoothing, one-step balanced solution B leads to a reduction in the
current total number from 81,895 to 50,012, while the variation in man-hours increases from
1,076 to 17,441. Instead, two-tier capacity smoothing may be another economical option to
absorb increased production needs by increasing man-hours accordingly over time, as shown
in Figure 11, while at the same time a smaller volume of storage is maintained, as shown in
Figure 12 of finished blocks, as seen in the balanced one-step solution, is not yet allowed in
the examined shipyard and leads to the rejection of the balanced solutions and one-step
smoothing.
Due to the classification of the solutions of the two MOGA approaches, the number of
Pareto solutions obtained by directed MOGA, which is dominated by those of NSGAII, is 11
and 8, respectively; while the number of NSGAII-Pareto solutions that are dominated by the
two sets of MOGA searches are 42 and 47, respectively.