Smart Manufacturing Scheduling Approaches—Systematic Review and Future Directions

The recent advances in technology and the demand for highly customized products have been forcing manufacturing companies to adapt and develop new solutions in order to become more dynamic and flexible to face the changing markets. Manufacturing scheduling plays a core role in this adaptation since it is crucial to ensure that all operations and processes are running on time in the factory. However, to develop robust scheduling solutions it is necessary to consider different requirements from the shopfloor, but it is not clear which constraints should be analyzed and most research studies end up considering very few of them. In this review article, several papers published in recent years were analyzed to understand how many and which requirements they consider when developing scheduling solutions for manufacturing systems. It is possible to understand that the majority of them are not able to be adapted to real systems since some core constraints are not even considered. Consequently, it is important to consider how manufacturing scheduling solutions can be structured to be adapted effortlessly for different manufacturing scenarios.

Manufacturing Scheduling Strategy for Digital Enterprise Transformation

Scientific research and mathematics are the driving forces of economic progress. Firms that can align themselves with the contemporary information and communication technology era through their decisions about the digital transformation and sustain their competitive advantage might have a higher chance of survival compared to those that cannot. The managerial decisions that revolve around manufacturing focus on production planning and control along with cost minimization. Scheduling and sequencing activities lie at the heart of production planning and control. This chapter provides a basic perspective for the transformation from the traditional batch processing type of short-term manufacturing scheduling to the single-piece flow type of scheduling while presenting a novel manufacturing scheduling model to minimize the manufacturing cost for varying setup times and job sequence.