An object oriented model for scheduling in agile manufacturing

Agility represents a key factor in industry to handle the continuous market changes. Companies must re-organise their activities to be agile and competitive in such a dynamic environment. In particular, production planning and control tools are very important to optimise the manufacturing process responsiveness to sudden changes in customer demand. In this paper an attempt has been made to develop an object oriented software architecture that allows the optimal line organisation to be determined once a set of parts to be produced has been ordered. An optimisation module represented by a simulated annealing algorithm has been interfaced with an object oriented architecture to build up a framework that can be used to select both the optimal schedule, the buffer capacity and the speed of the conveyors in a very short time. The main characteristic of the proposed system is represented by its extremely high flexibility and reconfigurability with respect to the sudden changes in the customer orders that are reflected on the mix to be produced. A test case is provided to demonstrate the potential of using the proposed software architecture. A discussion on the obtained results is also developed to prove how the system is able to cope with lines characterised by different configurations of available resources.