 Solving the Wire-Harness Design Problem at a European car manufacturerMarie-Sklaerder Vié, Nicolas Zufferey and Jean-François Cordeau European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 272, issue 2, 712-724 Abstract: In many industries, increasing competition and high customer expectations compel companies to widen their product offering. Car manufacturers face the same issue and tend to produce an increasingly large variety of models, with more and more electrical options. This leads to the design of a huge number of different electrical wire harnesses, but the use of component commonality can help reduce this number. This work, initiated in collaboration with a major European car manufacturer, provides a new mathematical formulation of the problem and several solution methods. Due to its size, the problem cannot be solved to optimality in reasonable time by exact methods. Hence, we introduce greedy heuristics, a descent method and a variable neighborhood search metaheuristic that provide high quality solutions in reasonable computing time. Results show that the use of these solution methods yields important cost savings with respect to the current practice of the company. Keywords: Combinatorial optimization; Metaheuristics; Component commonality; Car wire harness (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:272:y:2019:i:2:p:712-724 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.06.047 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.