Genetic algorithms for match-up rescheduling of the flexible manufacturing systems

Scheduling plays a vital role in ensuring the effectiveness of the production control of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). The scheduling problem in FMS is considered to be dynamic in its nature as new orders may arrive every day. The new orders need to be integrated with the existing production schedule immediately without disturbing the performance and the stability of existing schedule. Most FMS scheduling methods reported in the literature address the static FMS scheduling problems. In this paper, rescheduling methods based on genetic algorithms are described to address arrivals of new orders. This study proposes genetic algorithms for match-up rescheduling with non-reshuffle and reshuffle strategies which accommodate new orders by manipulating the available idle times on machines and by resequencing operations, respectively. The basic idea of the match-up approach is to modify only a part of the initial schedule and to develop genetic algorithms (GAs) to generate a solution within the rescheduling horizon in such a way that both the stability and performance of the shop floor are kept. The proposed non-reshuffle and reshuffle strategies have been evaluated and the results have been compared with the total-rescheduling method.     

Fuzzy neural network-based rescheduling decision mechanism for semiconductor manufacturing

Most semiconductor manufacturing systems (SMS) operate in a highly dynamic and unpredictable environment. The production rescheduling strategy addresses uncertainty and improves SMS performance. The rescheduling framework of SMS is presented as layered scheduling strategies with an optimization rescheduling decision mechanism. A fuzzy neural network (FNN) based rescheduling decision model is implemented which can rapidly choose an optimized rescheduling strategy to schedule the semiconductor wafer fabrication lines according to current system disturbances. The mapping between the input of FNN, such as disturbances, system state parameters, and the output of FNN, optimal rescheduling strategies, is constructed. An example of a semiconductor fabrication line in Shanghai is given. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed FNN-based rescheduling decision mechanism approach over the alternatives such as back-propagation neural network (BPNN) and multivariate regression (MR).     

Real-time integrated production-scheduling and maintenance-planning in a flexible job shop with machine deterioration and condition-based maintenance

The introduction of modern technologies in manufacturing is contributing to the emergence of smart (and data-driven) manufacturing systems, known as Industry 4.0. The benefits of adopting such technologies can be fully utilized by presenting optimization models in every step of the decision-making process. This includes the optimization of maintenance plans and production schedules, which are two essential aspects of any manufacturing process. In this paper, we consider the real-time joint optimization of maintenance planning and production scheduling in smart manufacturing systems. We have considered a flexible job shop production layout and addressed several issues that usually take place in practice. The addressed issues are: new job arrivals, unexpected due date changes, machine degradation, random breakdowns, minimal repairs, and condition-based maintenance (CBM). We have proposed a real-time optimization-based system that utilizes a modified hybrid genetic algorithm, an integrated proactive-reactive optimization model, and hybrid rescheduling policies. A set of modified benchmark problems is used to test the proposed system by comparing its performance to several other optimization algorithms and methods used in practice. The results show the superiority of the proposed system for solving the problem under study. The results also emphasize the importance of the quality of the generated baseline plans (i.e., initial integrated plans), the use of hybrid rescheduling policies, and the importance of rescheduling times (i.e., reaction times) for cost savings.     

Fast reactive scheduling to minimize tardiness penalty and energy cost under power consumption uncertainties

Motivated by the need to deal with uncertainties in energy optimization of flexible manufacturing systems, this paper considers a dynamic scheduling problem which minimizes the sum of energy cost and tardiness penalty under power consumption uncertainties. An integrated control and scheduling framework is proposed including two modules, namely, an augmented discrete event control (ADEC) and a max-throughput-min-energy reactive scheduling model (MTME). The ADEC is in charge of inhibiting jobs which may lead to deadlocks, and sequencing active jobs and resources. The MTME ensures the fulfillment of the innate constraints and decides the local optimal schedule of active jobs and resources. Our proposed framework is applied to an industrial stamping system with power consumption uncertainties formulated using three different probability distributions. The obtained schedules are compared with three dispatching rules and two rescheduling approaches. Our experiment results verify that MTME outperforms three dispatching rules in terms of deviation from Pareto optimality and reduces interrupted time significantly as compared to rescheduling approaches. In addition, ADEC and MTME are programmed using the same matrix language, providing easy implementation for industrial practitioners.     

An anticipative scheduling approach with controllable processing times

In practice, machine schedules are usually subject to disruptions which have to be repaired by reactive scheduling decisions. The most popular predictive approach in project management and machine scheduling literature is to leave idle times (time buffers) in schedules in coping with disruptions, i.e. the resources will be under-utilized. Therefore, preparing initial schedules by considering possible disruption times along with rescheduling objectives is critical for the performance of rescheduling decisions. In this paper, we show that if the processing times are controllable then an anticipative approach can be used to form an initial schedule so that the limited capacity of the production resources are utilized more effectively. To illustrate the anticipative scheduling idea, we consider a non-identical parallel machining environment, where processing times can be controlled at a certain compression cost. When there is a disruption during the execution of the initial schedule, a match-up time strategy is utilized such that a repaired schedule has to catch-up initial schedule at some point in future. This requires changing machine–job assignments and processing times for the rest of the schedule which implies increased manufacturing costs. We show that making anticipative job sequencing decisions, based on failure and repair time distributions and flexibility of jobs, one can repair schedules by incurring less manufacturing cost. Our computational results show that the match-up time strategy is very sensitive to initial schedule and the proposed anticipative scheduling algorithm can be very helpful to reduce rescheduling costs.     

Manifold learning based rescheduling decision mechanism for recessive disturbances in RFID-driven job shops

In actual manufacturing processes, some unexpected disturbances, called as recessive disturbances (e.g., job set-up time variation and arrival time deviation), would gradually make the original production schedule obsolete. It is hard for production managers to perceive their presences. Thus, the impact of recessive disturbances can not be eliminated by rescheduling in time. On account of this, a rescheduling decision mechanism for recessive disturbances in RFID-driven job shops is proposed in this article, and a manifold learning method, which reduces the response time of manufacturing system, is applied in the mechanism to preprocess manufacturing data. The rescheduling decision mechanism is expected to answer the questions of whether to reschedule, when to reschedule, and which rescheduling method to be used. Firstly, RFID devices acquire the actual process completion time of all work in process (WIPs) at every WIP machining process completion time. Secondly, recessive disturbances are quantified to time accumulation error (TAE) which represents the difference between actual process completion time and planned process completion time. Lastly, according to the TAE and production managers’ experience, the rescheduling decision mechanism selects a proper rescheduling method to update or repair the original production schedule. The realization algorithms of rescheduling decision mechanism includes: (1) supervised locally linear embedding. (2) General regression neural network. (3) Least square-support vector Machine. Finally, a numerical experiment is used to demonstrate the implementation procedures of the rescheduling decision mechanism.     

An ILS heuristic for the ship scheduling problem: application in the oil industry

This paper addresses a real‐life rescheduling problem of a pipe‐laying support vessel (PLSV) fleet in charge of subsea oil well connections. The short‐term schedule of these vessels is subject to uncertainties inherent to its operations, resulting in ships idleness or delays in oil production. The objective of this study is to develop methods to support a Brazilian oil and gas company in overcoming impacts caused by operational disruptions, while reaching its planned production level. The PLSV rescheduling problem was treated as an identical parallel machine scheduling problem, where the machines represent the vessels and the jobs are the activities for the subsea well connections. We propose a mathematical programming model and a method based on the iterated local search (ILS) metaheuristic to solve the problem. This paper contributes to this by considering simultaneously setup times, machine eligibility, release dates, due dates, and machine availability. Both methods were applied on 10 instances based on real PLSV data. Taking into account an objective function that measures the operational impact on schedules, the ILS provided an average improvement above 91% in schedules when compared to the initial solution provided by the studied company. The ILS outperformed a mathematical programming model for the problem, in eight instances, within a 30‐minute execution time limit, fitting to the company process.     

A multi-agent architecture for dynamic scheduling of steel hot rolling

Steel production is a complex process and finding coherent and effective schedules for the wide variety of production steps, in a dynamic environment, is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent architecture for integrated dynamic scheduling of the hot strip mill (HSM) and the continuous caster. The scheduling systems of these processes have very different objectives and constraints, and operate in an environment where there is a substantial quantity of real-time information concerning production failures and customer requests. Each process is assigned to an agent which independently, seeks an optimal dynamic schedule at a local level taking into account local objectives, real-time information and information received from other agents. Each agent can react to real-time events in order to fix any problems that occur. We focus here, particularly, on the HSM agent which uses a tabu search heuristic to create good predictive–reactive schedules quickly. The other agents simulate the production of the coil orders and the real-time events, which occur during the scheduling process. When real-time events occur on the HSM, the HSM agent might decide whether to repair the current schedule or reschedule from scratch. To address this problem, a range of schedule repair and complete rescheduling strategies are investigated and their performance is assessed with respect to measures of utility, stability and robustness, using an experimental simulation framework.     

SmartGantt – An intelligent system for real time rescheduling based on relational reinforcement learning

With the current trend towards cognitive manufacturing systems to deal with unforeseen events and disturbances that constantly demand real-time repair decisions, learning/reasoning skills and interactive capabilities are important functionalities for rescheduling a shop-floor on the fly taking into account several objectives and goal states. In this work, the automatic generation and update through learning of rescheduling knowledge using simulated transitions of abstract schedule states is proposed. Deictic representations of schedules based on focal points are used to define a repair policy which generates a goal-directed sequence of repair operators to face unplanned events and operational disturbances. An industrial example where rescheduling is needed due to the arrival of a new/rush order, or whenever raw material delay/shortage or machine breakdown events occur are discussed using the SmartGantt prototype for interactive rescheduling in real-time. SmartGantt demonstrates that due date compliance of orders-in-progress, negotiating delivery conditions of new orders and ensuring distributed production control can be dramatically improved by means of relational reinforcement learning and a deictic representation of rescheduling tasks.     

Robust scheduling on a single machine to minimize total flow time

In a real-world manufacturing environment featuring a variety of uncertainties, production schedules for manufacturing systems often cannot be executed exactly as they are developed. In these environments, schedule robustness that guarantees the best worst-case performance is a more appropriate criterion in developing schedules, although most existing studies have developed optimal schedules with respect to a deterministic or stochastic scheduling model. This study concerns robust single machine scheduling with uncertain job processing times and sequence-dependent family setup times explicitly represented by interval data. The objective is to obtain robust sequences of job families and jobs within each family that minimize the absolute deviation of total flow time from the optimal solution under the worst-case scenario. We prove that the robust single machine scheduling problem of interest is NP-hard. This problem is reformulated as a robust constrained shortest path problem and solved by a simulated annealing-based algorithmic framework that embeds a generalized label correcting method. The results of numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed heuristic is effective and efficient for determining robust schedules. In addition, we explore the impact of degree of uncertainty on the performance measures and examine the tradeoff between robustness and optimality.     

On the identical parallel-machine rescheduling with job rework disruption

This paper investigates an issue of rescheduling on identical parallel machines where the original jobs have already been scheduled to minimize the total completion time, when a single set of jobs to be reworked re-arrives and creates a job rework disruption. Two conflicting rescheduling criteria are considered: the total completion time, as the measure of scheduling cost (efficiency); and the number of jobs assigned to different machines in the original schedule and newly generated schedule, as the measure of disruption cost (stability). Further, the rescheduling problem is defined as a bi-criteria scheduling problem. Two polynomial time algorithms are proposed to lexicographically optimize the two criteria. Besides, the set of all efficient schedules with respect to the two criteria can be also generated in polynomial time.     

A decision-making framework for dynamic scheduling of cyber-physical production systems based on digital twins

Nowadays, one important challenge in cyber-physical production systems is updating dynamic production schedules through an automated decision-making performed while the production is running. The condition of the manufacturing equipment may in fact lead to schedule unfeasibility or inefficiency, thus requiring responsiveness to preserve productivity and reduce the operational costs. In order to address current limitations of traditional scheduling methods, this work proposes a new framework that exploits the aggregation of several digital twins, representing different physical assets and their autonomous decision-making, together with a global digital twin, in order to perform production scheduling optimization when it is needed. The decision-making process is supported on a fuzzy inference system using the state or conditions of different assets and the production rate of the whole system. The condition of the assets is predicted by the condition-based monitoring modules in the local digital twins of the workstations, whereas the production rate is evaluated and assured by the global digital twin of the shop floor. This paper presents a framework for decentralized and integrated decision-making for re-scheduling of a cyber-physical production system, and the validation and proof-of-concept of the proposed method in an Industry 4.0 pilot line of assembly process. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable to detect changes in the manufacturing process and to make appropriate decisions for re-scheduling the process.     

Proposing an architectural framework of a hybrid knowledge-based system for production rescheduling

An architectural configuration of a knowledge-based system for production rescheduling reported in this paper uncovers a number of points of interest to practitioners as well as researchers. The study shows that knowledge-based methods applied to production rescheduling are a valuable approach for manufacturers to manage production disturbances and deliver customer orders on time. Very often, developing an effective scheduling system whilst solving some problems requires an appropriate combination of a rigorous analysis of the production system state and the rules of thumb used by the human scheduler. In the actual performance of this hybrid system, an expert simulation system was used to produce new schedules that fit the real production environment.     

一类基于多Agent和分布式规则的敏捷生产调度

Agent范例为解决制造系统的敏捷生产调度问题提供了一条新途径,如何构建敏捷生产调度多Agent系统结构和Agent间的协调与生产调度机制,成为一个亟待解决的课题.本文阐述了一类基于多Agent和分布式规则构建敏捷生产调度的方法.首先通过基于功能分解的方法,给出了管理、资源和工件等三类Agent基本组件组成的分布式多Agent调度系统结构、Agent组件基本结构及定义.其次,利用基于分布式规则的方法,建立了Agent间的协调策略和调度机制,实现了敏捷生产调度.最后给出了应用此方法的调度仿真实验结果.     

Parallel machine match-up scheduling with manufacturing cost considerations

Many scheduling problems in practice involve rescheduling of disrupted schedules. In this study, we show that in contrast to fixed processing times, if we have the flexibility to control the processing times of the jobs, we can generate alternative reactive schedules considering the manufacturing cost implications in response to disruptions. We consider a non-identical parallel machining environment where processing times of the jobs are compressible at a certain manufacturing cost, which is a convex function of the compression on the processing time. In rescheduling it is highly desirable to catch up the original schedule as soon as possible by reassigning the jobs to the machines and compressing their processing times. On the other hand, one must also keep the manufacturing cost due to compression of the jobs low. Thus, one is faced with a tradeoff between match-up time and manufacturing cost criteria. We introduce alternative match-up scheduling problems for finding schedules on the efficient frontier of this time/cost tradeoff. We employ the recent advances in conic mixed-integer programming to model these problems effectively. We further provide a fast heuristic algorithm driven by dual prices of convex subproblems for generating approximate efficient schedules.     

Supporting rescheduling using CSP, RMS and POB—an example application

This paper introduces an innovative approach to the problem of rescheduling within manufacturing industry. An example of a manufacturing context that requires rescheduling capability is given (tyre production). The meaning of rescheduling, possible metrics for assessment of rescheduling and the advantages of applying the new techniques are reviewed. Of particular importance is the notion that the technology for providing rescheduling and explanation capabilities is to a large degree problem and context insensitive. The manner in which an original schedule has been created is irrelevant to the use of the technology described, allowing the advantages of the approach to be realized as an add-on facility to any existing scheduling system that fulfills a minimal set of requirements. These advantages are due to the use of a constraint based approach to new schedule creation used in tandem with dependency analysis techniques based on reason maintenance systems (de Kleer, 1986) and partial order backtracking (Ginsberg and McAllister, 1995; Spragg and Kelleher, 1996).     

基于Agent的混合流水车间动态调度系统

针对敏捷制造调度环境的不确定性、动态性以及混合流水车间（HFS）调度问题的特点,设计了一种基于多Agent的混合流水车间动态调度系统,系统由管理Agent、策略Agent、工件Agent和机器Agent构成。首先提出一种针对混合流水车间环境的插值排序（HIS）算法并集成于策略Agent中,该算法适用于静态调度和多种动态事件下的动态调度。然后,设计了各类Agent间的协调机制,在生产过程中所有Agent根据各自的行为逻辑独立工作并互相协调。在发生动态事件时,策略Agent调用HIS算法根据当前车间状态产生工件序列,随后各Agent根据生成的序列继续进行协调直到完成生产。最后进行了发生机器故障、订单插入情况下的重调度以及在线调度等动态调度的实例仿真,结果表明对于这些问题,HIS算法的求解效果均优于调度规则,特别是在故障重调度中,HIS算法重调度前后的Makespan一致度达97.6%,说明系统能够灵活和有效地处理混合流水车间动态调度问题。     

柔性制造系统的时间Petri网建模与分析

时间Petri网是描述和验证实时系统最常用的形式模型之一。建立基于时间 Petri网的典型柔性制造系统模型,利用状态类分析方法,定量计算所有可行调度及其执行时间,进而获得最优调度,为复杂柔性制造系统的建模与调度提供有效的模型支持。     

A two-stage heuristic approach for nurse scheduling problem: A case study in an emergency department

Nurse scheduling is a critical issue in the management of emergency department. Under the intense work environment, it is imperative to make quality nurse schedules in a most cost and time effective way. To this end, a spreadsheet-based two-stage heuristic approach is proposed for the nurse scheduling problem (NSP) in a local emergency department. First, an initial schedule satisfying all hard constraints is generated by the simple shift assignment heuristic. Second, the sequential local search algorithm is employed to improve the initial schedules by taking soft constraints (nurse preferences) into account. The proposed approach is benchmarked with the existing approach and 0–1 programming. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it is one of a few studies in nurse scheduling literature using heuristic approach to generate nurse schedules based on Excel spreadsheet. Therefore, users with little knowledge on linear programming and computer sciences can operate and change the scheduling algorithms easily. Second, while most studies on nurse scheduling are situated in hospitals, this paper attempts to bridge the research gap by investigating the NSP in the emergency department where the scheduling rules are much more restrictive due to the intense and dynamic work environment. Overall, our approach generates satisfactory schedules with higher level of user-friendliness, efficiency, and flexibility of rescheduling as compared to both the existing approach and 0–1 programming.     

Review of real-time vehicle schedule recovery methods in transportation services

This paper presents a comprehensive review on methods for real-time schedule recovery in transportation services. The survey concentrates on published research on recovery of planned schedules in the occurrence of one or several severe disruptions such as vehicle breakdowns, accidents, and delays. Only vehicle assignment and rescheduling are reviewed; crew scheduling and passenger logistics problems during disruptions are not. Real-time vehicle schedule recovery problems (RTVSRP) are classified into three classes: vehicle rescheduling, for road-based services, train-based rescheduling, and airline schedule recovery problems. For each class, a classification of the models is presented based on problem formulations and solution strategies. The paper concludes that RTVSRP is a challenging problem that requires quick and good quality solutions to very difficult and complex situations, involving several different contexts, restrictions, and objectives. The paper also identifies research gaps to be investigated in the future, stimulating research in this area.