Tabu-search-based order seat planning for engineer-to-order manufacturing

Abstract

This paper focuses on engineer-to-order (ETO) products, where the combination of components varies according to the customer requirements. However, components are not specialised for each product; rather, multiple components can be used for different products ('shared component' hereinafter). An issue faced by target ETO companies is that although they always have a huge component inventory, the order-receiving rate is low. One reason for this is that the components are allocated to orders sequentially; therefore, orders arriving later may have a higher chance of refusal, particularly under conditions of component shortages. To solve this problem, an order seat booking system is proposed with consideration of short-term demand information, component inventory, and component combinations for different product specifications. A seat planning algorithm based on tabu search is developed to increase the seat count by distributing the shared components among the order seats. The effect of increased order intake by using the planned order-receiving system is confirmed by numerical experiments.