Discrete Event Production Simulation and Optimisation of Ship Block Erection Process

Nowadays, shipyards are making every effort to efficiently manage equipments and resources such as labourers, gantry cranes, transporters, steel and block stock yards, etc. The block erection scheduling of a gantry crane has thus far been manually performed by a manager of a shipyard. Such a scenario leads to undesirably long times for producing scheduling results. In addition, the quality of the scheduling results may not be optimal. To improve the overall process, block erection discrete event simulations have been developed in this study by using techniques of optimization. The first results presented in this paper are promising even if some future work must be realized.