Integrated machine-scheduling and inventory planning of door manufacturing operations at OYAK Renault factory

Abstract

A car passes through press, body shell, painting and assembly stages during its manufacturing process. Due to the increased competition among car manufacturers, they aim to continuously advance and improve their processes. In this study, we analyze planning operations for the production of front/back and left/right doors in body shell department of Bursa Oyak-Renault factory and propose heuristic algorithms to improve their planning processes. In this study, we present four different mathematical models and two heuristics approaches which decrease the current costs of the company particularly with respect to inventory carrying and setup perspectives. In the body shell department of the company, there are two parallel manufacturing cells which produces doors to be assembled on the consumption line. The effective planning and scheduling of the jobs on these lines requires solving the problem of integrated machine-scheduling and inventory planning subject to inclusive eligibility constraints and sequence independent setup times with job availability in flexible manufacturing cells of the body shell department. The novelty in the models lie in the integration of inventory planning and production scheduling decisions with the aim of streamlining operations of the door manufacturing cells with the consumption line. One of the proposed heuristic approaches is Rolling Horizon Algorithm (RHA) which divides the planning horizon into sub-intervals and solves the problem by rolling the solutions through sub-intervals. The other proposed algorithm is Two-Pass Algorithm which divides the planning horizon into sub-intervals and solves each sub-problem in each sub-interval to optimality for two times by maintaining the starting and ending inventory levels feasible. These approaches are implemented with Gurobi optimization software and Java programming language and applied within a decision support system that supports daily planning activities.