Constraint-based Assembly Line Sequencing Date

A wide variety of combinatorial optimization problems have been studied in recent years Of particular interest are a class of optimization problems arising from the manufacturing of vehicles on assembly lines These problems consist of sequencing the vehicles that are going to be produced such that their production is done in an e cient cost e ective manner In this thesis we introduce a real world vehicle sequencing problem that was provided by TigrSoft who solved the problem for one of their clients using a greedy search approach We began by modeling this prob lem as a constraint satisfaction problem and from there we devised three di erent solution techniques for solving it These solution techniques include a simple hill climbing algorithm a backtracking algorithm with parameterized soft constraints and a branch and bound algorithm that is capable of nding optimal solutions We were able to improve results compared to TigrSoft s algorithm using any of these three solution techniques For our best method a branch and bound tech nique with a decomposition into smaller sub problems we obtained improvements ranging between and for six real world problem instances