Resorting vehicles in an automotive manufacturing environment

One of the most important concepts in an automotive production process is that of a manufacturing sequence. Sequencing has a vital influence on a series of important performance indicators such as load balance, setup time, setup cost, timeliness, flow of material etc. Generating appropriate sequences has thus become a key task for the automotive production planner. Ensuring the stability of a sequence, once it has been determined, by sorting its actual version back into the form intended originally, however, with systematic means, is a new issue gaining recently more importance. This problem represents the main topic of the present paper. Instruments for physically resorting vehicles are sorting channels and parking spaces. Both instruments are closely related to one another, as will be shown.