Cable trees are used in industrial products to transmit energy and information between different product parts. To this date, they are mostly assembled by humans and only few automated manufacturing solutions exist using complex robotic machines. For these machines, the wiring plan has to be translated into a wiring sequence of cable plugging operations to be followed by the machine. In this paper, we study and formalize the problem of deriving the optimal wiring sequence for a given layout of a cable tree. We summarize our investigations to model this cable tree wiring problem (CTW). as a traveling salesman problem with atomic, soft atomic, and disjunctive precedence constraints as well as tour-dependent edge costs such that it can be solved by state-of-the-art constraint programming (CP), Optimization Modulo Theories (OMT), and mixed-integer programming (MIP). solvers. It is further shown, how the CTW problem can be viewed as a soft version of the coupled tasks scheduling problem. We discuss various modeling variants for the problem, prove its NP-hardness, and empirically compare CP, OMT, and MIP solvers on a benchmark set of 278 instances. The complete benchmark set with all models and instance data is available on github and was included in the MiniZinc challenge 2020.

电缆树用于工业产品中，用于在不同产品部件之间传输能量和信息。迄今为止，它们大多由人工组装，使用复杂机器人机器的自动化制造解决方案很少。对于这些机器，布线计划必须转化为机器要遵循的电缆插入操作的布线顺序。在本文中，我们研究并形式化了为给定的电缆树布局推导最佳布线顺序的问题。我们总结了我们的调查，以模拟这种电缆树布线问题 (CTW)。作为一个旅行推销员问题，具有原子、软原子和析取优先约束以及与巡回相关的边缘成本，因此可以通过最先进的约束规划 (CP)、优化模理论 (OMT) 来解决，和混合整数规划（MIP）。求解器。进一步表明，如何将 CTW 问题视为耦合任务调度问题的软版本。我们讨论了该问题的各种建模变体，证明了它的 NP-hardness，并在 278 个实例的基准集上经验性地比较了 CP、OMT 和 MIP 求解器。包含所有模型和实例数据的完整基准测试集可在 github 上获得，并包含在 2020 年 MiniZinc 挑战赛中。