On the Interest of Reconsidering a Real-Life Car Sequencing Model
Résumé
One of the most strategic processes in the automotive industry is to generate the car sequence to produce per day. The sequencing objective is to position high and low workload vehicles in the sequence to produce, such that the work overloads for the operators or emergency situations are avoided. To do so, most of the car manufacturers adopted an approach based on the Car Sequencing (CS) model, at the expense of other models like the Mixed-Model Sequencing (MMS) or the Level Scheduling (LS). The CS model has the advantage of simply addressing the industrial environment's constraints via sequencing rules, that are easy to understand and interpret for decision makers. Nevertheless, this CS model is hardly facing new challenges and presents some computing weaknesses. We discuss in this paper our motivations in reconsidering the Car Sequencing model of a French manufacturer, RENAULT, in its challenging and fast-changing industrial context.