Development of a theory of constraints based scheduling system for ship piping production

Manufacturing of ship piping system is one of the major production activities in shipbuilding. The schedule of pipe production has an important impact on master schedule of shipbuilding. In this research, the theory of constraints (TOC) concept is introduced to solve the scheduling problems of piping factory, and an intelligent scheduling system is developed. The system integrates a product model, an operation model, a factory model and a knowledge database of piping production and can make the process planning and production scheduling automatically. In the paper, details of above points are discussed. Moreover, an application of the system in a piping factory, which achieves a higher level of performance as measured by tardiness, lead time and inventory, is demonstrated at the end of the paper.