Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH, cilt.183, 2025 (SCI-Expanded)
Considering production costs and tight timelines in the shipbuilding industry, this study addresses the costoriented multi-skill project scheduling problem (MSPSP) within the Shipyard Steelworks Department (SSD) as a critical component of ship projects. The addressed problem aims to minimize costs by scheduling tasks performed on workstations without exceeding project deadlines and efficiently allocating available workforce within the SSD. To this end, a set of genetic algorithm (GA)-based approaches is proposed, considering multiple aspects of workforce at tactical and operational-level scenarios to tackle the problem from diverse perspectives. Furthermore, a design of experiment setting is implemented to explore key factors affecting the SSD, including the number of workstations where tasks are performed, the workers, and their skill levels. This provides insights into theoretical, methodological, and managerial aspects. By doing so, key findings are obtained by examining how the proposed approaches affect the cost objective with different combinations of factors in the SSD. Computational results reveal that regardless of the proficiency level of the workers, multi-skilled workers achieve up to 30 % higher-quality solutions when employing a specialization-oriented workforce approach compared to a combination of function-specific workers using the same approach. Similarly, employing multi-skilled workers within a flexible workforce approach results in solutions of up to 85 % higher quality compared to using a combination of function-specific workers with the same approach. As such, these results suggest the critical importance of employing multi-skilled workers in SSD for effective cost performance, indicating the need for careful review of planning and workforce management decisions in ship projects.