For shipbuilding, spatial scheduling and workforce assignment are two important issues for the operation management in block assembly shops. Spatial scheduling is to decide where and when to assemble blocks, while workforce assignment is to assign working teams to the blocks. Traditionally, they are made separately at different levels in the production management framework. The combining of such decisions presents additional complexity and new problems. This paper proposes an approach that solves jointly the spatial scheduling problem and the workforce assignment problem. The objective is to improve the coordination among working teams and increase the productivity of assembly shops. A spatial layout strategy is designed according to extreme point and deep bottom left strategies. By using genetic algorithm, a solution method is developed based on the spatial layout strategy and several assignment and sequence rules. Some computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the presented algorithm and compare it with other commonly used methods. Computational results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
