Patent ID: 7577485

Claim:
A building sequence planning system for an automobile production line, said system comprising: an input unit for inputting vehicle information of vehicles to be manufactured, the vehicle information including the number of vehicles residing or accumulated between two processes, a processing unit for deciding an optimum building sequence based on the vehicle information inputted through said input unit, and an output unit for externally outputting a building sequence schedule decided by said processing unit, wherein said automobile production line is a mixed line including a first line and a second line respectively in parallel, and a third line branching from said second line and joining with said first line, wherein said processing unit includes an initial offline sequence preparing unit for preparing an initial vehicle building sequence of the automobile production line based on the vehicle information input to said input unit, and operates to output said optimum building sequence by (i) calculating an evaluation value from the vehicle information, including an initial automobile building sequence, input to said input unit, and storing the evaluation value, (ii) calculating a new evaluation value from another, new automobile building sequence, (iii) comparing the new evaluation value with the stored evaluation value, (iv) adopting the new automobile building sequence when the new evaluation value is improved, (v) discarding the new automobile building sequence when the new evaluation value is not improved, (vi) ending processing when repetitive searches have been completed, and (vii) outputting a most recently adopted automobile building sequence as said optimum building sequence.