A GRASP approach to transporter scheduling for ship assembly block operations management

In this paper, we address the transporter scheduling problem of ship assembly block operations management, which can be transformed into parallel machine scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times and precedence constraints. The objective is to maximise the workload balance among transporters under the time constraint that all assembly blocks should be transported in the predetermined period. We develop the GRASP algorithm for transporter scheduling, because parallel machine scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times and precedence constraints is an NP-hard problem. Through simulation experiments, we analyse some aspects of the developed GRASP algorithm, and compare the developed GRASP algorithm with other heuristics for large-scale instances and the optimal solution approach for small-sized instances. The comparison experiments show that the developed GRASP algorithm outperforms other heuristics and is a promising heuristic for transporter scheduling. [Received 9 March 2011; Revised 26 June 2011; Revised 10 September 2011; Accepted 15 October 2011]