Industry 4.0: Smart Scheduling

Abstract

Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 production environments integrate the physical and decisional aspects of manufacturing processes into autonomous and decentralised systems. One of the main aspects in these systems is production planning, in particular scheduling operations on machines. We introduce here a new decision-making schema, Smart Scheduling, intended to yield flexible and efficient production schedules on the fly, taking advantage of the features of these new environments. The ability to face unforeseen and disruptive events is one of the main improvements in our proposed schema, which uses an efficient screening procedure (Tolerance Scheduling) to lessen the need of rescheduling in the face of those events.