A mobile application for knowledge-enriched short-term scheduling of complex products

The ever-increasing product complexity, especially for the case of engineer-to-order products, highly affects the performance of manufacturing systems. Therefore, a high degree of flexibility is needed during daily decision-making activities, such as production scheduling. For addressing this challenge, this research work proposes a knowledge-enriched short-term job-shop scheduling mechanism, which is implemented into a mobile application. More precisely, it focuses on the short-term scheduling of the resources of the machine shop, through an intelligent algorithm that generates and evaluates alternative assignments of resources to tasks. Based on the requirements of a new order, a similarity mechanism retrieves successfully executed past orders together with a dataset that includes the processing times, the job and task sequence, and the suitable resources. In addition to that, the similarity mechanism is used to calculate the due-date assignments of the orders based on the knowledge stored in past cases. Afterwards, it adapts these parameters to the requirements of the new order so as to evaluate the alternative schedules and identify a good alternative in a timely manner. The deriving schedule can be presented on mobile devices, and it can be manipulated by the planner on-the-fly respecting tasks precedence constraints and machine availability. A case study from the mould-making industry is used for validating the proposed method and application.