Scheduling a manufacturing process with several rail-bound and identical machines in the project EWiMa

Abstract

In the project EWiMa, efficient procedures for the manufacturing of wing covers are developed. One major objective is the manufacturing of such a component on GroFi. GroFi is a technology demonstrator for an innovative manufacturing plant that is specialized on the production of large-scale lightweight components. It is developed by the DLR in Stade (Germany). A special feature of the plant is the possibility to split steps of the production process between several identical production-units. The units are mobile on a rail network. It is expected that the production process is drastically shortened by synchronizing those steps. Among other problems the scheduling of the cooperating units is investigated by the DLR. In the project EWiMa, the usage of two synchronized fibre-placement units for the manufacturing process will be demonstrated for the first time. The schedules are calculated with a model that has been derived from the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem. The proposed presentation will describe the problems and conditions that have been considered for the scheduling. Furthermore the discrepancy between the modelled and the real execution times is examined to identify future improvements.