A Distributed Production Scheduling Method for Highly-Distributed Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Recent development of computer network technologies is realizing highly-distributed manufacturing systems from the hardware point of view, where each facility is computerized and manages itself autonomously by communicating with other facilities. For this new type of manufacturing systems, a new discrete event simulation paradigm has been discussed, in which sorting of events is performed by exchanging messages about their occurrence times among the facilities. To make this paradigm beneficial enough, it is desirable that re-scheduling process performed after the simulation is carried out in a similar paradigm. We have developed some production scheduling methods for flexible flow-shop production of only one kind of products with just one stage. This paper presents an improved method which can be applied to flexible flow-shop of multiple kinds of products with multiple stages. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.