Scheduling/rescheduling in the manufacturing operating system environment†

A scheduling/rescheduling procedure is proposed for real-time control of a computerized manufacturing facility managed by a central manufacturing operating system. The procedure implies schedule revisions upon significant operational changes such as machine breakdowns. Experiments to evaluate the total production time of a computerized manufacturing system with breakdowns under scheduling/rescheduling have yielded advantages of between 25% to 7-0% compared to fixed sequencing and priority despatching procedures, respectively. Computation times required for the scheduling procedures on a CDC 65OO/66OO have also been studied. The scheduling/rescheduling procedure for an actual facility required less than two minutes, and the computation time can be regulated by the selection of parameters in an approximate method of scheduling.