Abstract
The scheduling of assembly process of hull blocks is very important to rationalize the total construction scheduling because the block assembly is in the middle of the manufacturing process between fabrication and erection. Hence, some researches have been made till now. There are two systems to assemble the blocks: the case done on the fixed area in a wide yard, and the case of line flow system on the conveyor. In the former case it is necessary to optimize the space where blocks are located. Though this allocation of blocks is carried out by experienced workers now, the system which supports this work has been developed recently. Since these systems are done by manual operation on the computer display, an automatic allocation system was developed by the authors here, imitating an optimal allocation of plate nesting.
The applied method is the simulated annealing (SA), which is one of the meta-heuristics approach for combinatorial optimization problems. This paper introduces the technique of the optimization of allocation and the calculation results for sample data. The results showed that this SA method is more effective to optimize the block allocation on the assembly area.
