Large neighborhood search for an aeronautical assembly line time-constrained scheduling problem with multiple modes and a resource leveling objective

This paper deals with a scheduling problem arising at the tactical decision level in aeronautical assembly line. It has the structure of a challenging multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem with incompatibility constraints, a resource leveling objective and also a large number of tasks. We first present a new event-based mixed-integer linear programming formulation and a standard constraint programming formulation of the problem. A large-neighborhood search approach based on the constraint programming model and tailored to the resource leveling objective is proposed. The approaches are tested and compared using industrial instances, yielding significant improvement compared to the heuristic currently used by the company. Moreover, the large-neighborhood search method significantly improves the method proposed in the literature on a related multi-mode resource investment problem when short CPU times are required.