The car sequencing problem: Overview of state-of-the-art methods and industrial case-study of the ROADEF’2005 challenge problem

The ROADEF challenge is organized every two years by the French Society of Operations Research and Decision-Making Aid. The goal is to allow industrial partners to witness recent developments in the field of Operations Research and Decision Analysis, and researchers to face up a decisional problem, often complex, occurred in industry. In 2005, the subject of this challenge has been proposed by the car manufacturer RENAULT and concerned a car sequencing problem. This problem involves scheduling cars along an assembly line with hard and soft capacity constraints. The industrial problem considered in the challenge differs from the standard problem since, besides capacity constraints imposed by the assembly shop, it also introduces paint batching constraints to minimize the consumption of solvents in the paint shop. We review the exact and heuristic methods of the literature proposed to solve the standard problem and we present the industrial context and the specificities of the challenge problem. We describe the process of the ROADEF’2005 challenge and the methods proposed by the competing teams. We also analyse the results of these methods on the car sequencing instances provided by RENAULT. The final ranking of the candidates is reported and directions for future research based on the results are drawn.