Abstract

The profile shops in shipyards produce section steels required for block production of ships. Due to the limitations of shipyard’s production capacity, a considerable amount of work is already outsourced. In addition, the need to improve the productivity of the profile shops is growing because the production volume is expected to increase due to the recent boom in the shipbuilding industry. In this study, a scheduling optimization was conducted for a parallel welding line of the profile process, with the aim of minimizing tardiness and the number of set-up changes as objective functions to achieve productivity improvements. In particular, this study applied a dynamic scheduling method to determine the job sequence considering variability of processing time. A Markov decision process model was proposed for the job sequence problem, considering the trade-off relationship between two objective functions. Deep reinforcement learning was also used to learn the optimal scheduling policy. The developed algorithm was evaluated by comparing its performance with priority rules (SSPT, ATCS, MDD, COVERT rule) in test scenarios constructed by the sampling data. As a result, the proposed scheduling algorithms outperformed than the priority rules in terms of set-up ratio, tardiness, and makespan.

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