Effective production scheduling can have a dramatic impact on manufacturing productivity. In modern automated manufacturing systems, scheduling can help reduce indirect costs which comprise a large portion of manufacturing costs in those systems. The objective of the proposed research is to study the feasibility of automatically scheduling multi-machine complexes on a real-time basis and implementing a unified computer system to provide new scheduling tools in automated systems. Factrol, Inc., will investigate real-time scheduling by separating schedule generation and regeneration tasks from schedule adaptation/recovery tasks. They will explore the effectiveness of heunstics to automatically determine variable rescheduling penods, schedule adaptation/recovery procedures, and schedule regeneration procedures. This research will lead to a new product family for Factrol, Inc., and is motivated by user requirements derived from applications of their current product, FACTOR, which provides shop floor scheduling tools. FACTOR has been applied successfully in automated systems, and will serve as an important experimental framework for the research.Anticipated Results and
Potential Commercial Applications: Research could lead to the development of a new product for real time adaptive scheduling of automated manufacturing cells.
