Abstract
A ship which is a huge structure can not be constructed all at once. Thus, the ship is divided into a number of blocks. Each block is assembled in the assembly shop. Then, the blocks are joined together on the dock. For moving the blocks from one position to another position, transporters are being used. However, the management of the transporters, called the block transportation scheduling, has been manually performed by a designer using his knowledge and experience. Thus, it was hard for the designer to yield a good result. To improve this problem, an optimal block transportation scheduling system is developed in this study, considering the minimization of the travel distance without overload of multiple transporters and interferences between them. To evaluate the applicability of the developed system, it is applied to block transportation scheduling problems of shipyards. The result shows that the developed system can be effectively applied to those problems.