An online approach to dynamic rescheduling for production planning applications

Manufacturing firms must often consider how to plan the production of a new order while containing the impact on the existing plan. Two approaches are typically used to solve the problem: online scheduling and rescheduling. State-of-the-art for both strategies is analyzed and methods available in the literature are proved to be inefficient for real world cases coming from production planning problems in a manufacturing firm. We propose an alternative approach combining the most effective aspects of both traditional approaches. The already available production plan and the characteristics of the new order to be planned are studied and used in order to generate a new production plan that meets two requirements: containing the number of changes to the existing plan and minimizing the delays due to the newly planned order. Constraint programming is used to implement the proposed approach. Results on case studies are also provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.