Heuristics for an industrial car sequencing problem considering paint and assembly shop objectives

The aim of this paper is to study the problem of sequencing a set of vehicles within an industrial environment considering the assembly shop objectives, but also the objectives of the paint shop. The first approach is to solve the problem with a mono-objective function. One heuristic (a progressive, construction-sequence algorithm) and three meta-heuristics (simulated annealing, variable neighbourhood search and an evolutionary algorithm) are described and compared. As the mono-objective approach has limited possibilities, a multi-objective heuristic is finally presented and tested. Because of the industrial context of this research, the computation time is a decisive factor to select the appropriate heuristic.