An agile scheduling and control approach in ETO construction supply chains

Abstract

A special characteristic of Engineer-to-Order (ETO) construction supplier companies is that they are composed of an off-site and on-site production part. Often, their synchronization is difficult by using traditional scheduling and monitoring methodologies resulting in excessive lead times, buffer levels and, as a result, additional costs. Real-time data, made available by Industry 4.0 technologies, represent a high potential to sense and react to plan deviations as soon as they appear. The paper presents a decentralized and agile approach for scheduling and control in ETO construction supply chains. The approach was modelled and validated based on a case study of an ETO façade supplier company and a discrete event simulation. It emerged that the agile approach has its main benefits in the reduction of buffer sizes and construction lead-times. The original aspect of the article is the investigation of effects of agile scheduling and control in ETO construction supply chains.