Comparing four metaheuristics for solving a constraint satisfaction problem for ship outfitting scheduling

This study compares the performance of four different metaheuristics for solving a constraint satisfaction scheduling problem of the outfitting process of shipbuilding. The ship outfitting process is often unorganised and chaotic due to the complex interactions between the stakeholders and the overall lack of sufficiently detailed planning. The examined methods are genetic algorithms (GA), simulated annealing (SA), genetic simulated annealing (GSA) and discrete particle swarm optimisation (PSO). Each of these methods relies on a list scheduling heuristic to transform the solution space into feasible schedules. Although the SA had the best performance for a medium-sized superstructure section, the GSA created the best schedules for engine room double-bottom sections, the most complex sections in terms of outfitting. The GA provided the best scalability in terms of computational time while only marginally sacrificing solution quality. The solution quality of the PSO was very poor in comparison with the other methods. All methods generated schedules with sufficiently high resource utilisation, approximately 95%. The findings from this work will be incorporated into a larger project with the aim of creating a tool which can automatically generate an outfitting planning for a vessel.