This paper deals with two most important problems, from both practical and theoretical standpoints, arising when building the ships in N different docks. Such docks have become core components of modern ship construction. One problem is to minimize the number of building docks in the shipyard, while the other is to keep the usage rate of resources fed into docks as constant as possible. In this paper the combined problem is formulated as a single-integer programming model. The LP-relaxation of this model is solved by column-generation techniques. Practical applications of this formulation are also discussed.