Long-term capacity planning in the shipbuilding industry

Flexibility of production systems plays a key role in the shipbuilding industry. The shipyards meet the challenge of fluctuating demand of different ship types. Under these circumstances, capacity planning is very challenging. Another difficulty is the decline of the level of automation from pre-fabrication to final assemby. Investments in automation often not result in the estimated benefit, especially, when another ship type has to be produced and the charges of the different workshops are modified. Thus a tool is desirable to support the investment decisions in long term capacity planning. This paper introduces a planning method, which enables based on the part family approach and discrete-event-simulation to evaluate investment decisions as well as the flexibility of a shipyard in a dynamic way.