Knowledge-Based Curved Block Construction Scheduling and Application in Shipbuilding

To increase efficiency in fierce competition, it is necessary and urgent to improve the standard of production planning for shipbuilding. The construction of curved blocks is the bottleneck to improve the efficiency of shipbuilding. Thus it is a key breakthrough for higher shipbuilding productivity to study the curved block production. By analyzing the scheduling problem in curved blocks production, we propose an intelligent curved block production scheduling method and its system based on a knowledge base, and show the main process of the system. The functions of the system include data management, assembly plan generation, plan adjustment, and plan evaluation. In order to deal with the actual situation and inherit the empirical knowledge, the system extracts some rules to control block selecting, algorithm selection, and evaluation thresholds to build a production decision-making knowledge base in the curved block scheduling system. The proposed knowledge base could be referred and modified by users, especially after a few interactions between the users and the knowledge base. The final assembly plan can be visualized and evaluated to facilitate the observation of plan implementation and effects of the decisions in the process. Finally, the system is verified by a large shipyard in Shanghai using real data and the results illustrate that the proposed method can perform the knowledge-based scheduling for curved blocks construction effectively. © 2022, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.