Integrated modelling and algorithm of material delivery and line-side storage for aircraft moving assembly lines

This paper considers the material supply problem for aircraft moving assembly lines. Distinguished from general automobile assembly lines, multiple parallel jobs are assembled concurrently and durations of assembly jobs are quite long, thus amounts of materials are orderly stored at the line-side space at the same time. In addition, the line-side space should be reused in the time dimension. With these characteristics, decisions on line-side storage of materials were introduced on the basis of material batching and tow-trains scheduling problems. An integrated decision–making mathematical model with the objective of minimising the number of deliveries was established. A hybrid endocrine-immune algorithm (HEIA) was proposed to jointly make decisions on the delivery batch, delivery time and storage positions of each job’s materials. Numerical experiments with the real-world data and randomly generated instances validate the effectiveness and efficiency of HEIA.