Abstract
Vehicle manufacturing plant is a typical mixed-model production system. Generally it consists of three main shops including body shop, painting shop and assembly shop in addition to engine shop. Each shop contains diverse manufacturing processes, all of which are integrated in a form of flow line. Due to the high pressure from the market requesting small-volume large variety production, production planning becomes very critical for the competitiveness of automotive industry. In order to save costs and production time, production planning system is requested to meet some designated requirements for each shop: to balance the work load in body and assembly shops, and to minimize the number of color changes in painting shop. In this context, we developed a sequencing module for a vehicle production planning system using the ILOG Solver Library. It is designed to take into account all the manufacturing constraints at a time with meeting hard constraints in body shop, minimizing the number of soft constraints violated in assembly shop, and minimizing the number of color changes in painting shop.