VW's prototype shop scheduled daily work with integer programming, lifting output 38.7%

The Volkswagen Pre-Production Center (VPC) assembles every prototype of the Volkswagen brand, but its staff were often under-utilized and manufacturing volume was low for the available capacity.

TU Braunschweig researchers first built a binary integer programming prototype for the capacity scheduling problem. It revealed substantial headroom over the manual procedure.

A spreadsheet-based decision support system was then rolled out for daily scheduling. On average, the optimization plans increased total manufacturing volume by 38.7% versus manually generated plans.

After successful test implementation and rollout, the VPC estimated annual cost savings in the six-digit euro range, and OR/MS methods began spreading to neighboring departments.

Solve capacity scheduling daily, not by habit

A cheap prototype proved the upside before any rollout commitment.

Spreadsheet delivery matched how planners already worked.

Scheduling orders onto resources beats hoping for utilization.

A 38.7% volume lift turned a niche prototype shop into a showcase for OR.

Before automating a whole plant, prototype the model beside the existing manual process; a tool daily planners can open in a spreadsheet gets adopted where a black-box system would not.

The work was summarized by the OR Society in 'Improving Resource Utilisation in Prototype Vehicle Production' (2020) and published in INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics; the same research group continued spreading optimization to neighboring VPC departments.