Optimizing the distribution of work in the automotive workshop according to the criteria of minimum delay time

In the operation of many car repair shops there are problems related to the optimal distribution of work by workstation and employees. Considered a vehicle maintenance shop that accepts and distributes work orders to work stations. Start time and end time requirements must be met for each request. In general, the execution of each request has a different execution time. The goal is to make a plan for distributing the requests to the workstations. This plan should be such that the sum of the variance in query execution times is minimal. A specialized repair shop, who is established in the local market of repair services, has been researched. The management of the company is looking for a way to process the largest possible number of requests, preserving the quality of the service. The problem was solved by creating a mathematical model which was implemented in MATLAB. The model can be used to solve optimization tasks in workshops of different sizes and different working hours. The software also includes the ability to change other parameters. In the considered specific example, the software gives an optimal distribution of orders according to the parameters working hours and working channels. After the optimization, the minimum obtained total delay of customer requests is 3.77 hours and the total overtime of workstations for the day is 2.26 hours. Relative units have been introduced for the value of delay compensation – 4 units/hour and the value of overtime work – 20 units/hour. Through the program, the optimal distribution of the requests is determined, looking for the minimum total compensation with specifically set of input parameters. The proposed solution can be applied to other workshops with similar work organization. The current software product will be used to train students from the “Transportation Technology and Management” major in the discipline “Organization and Management of Service Activities in Transport” at Angel Kanchev University of Ruse.