DYNAMIC JOB-SHOP LEAN SCHEDULING AND CONWIP SHOP-FLOOR CONTROL USING SOFTWARE AGENTS

With leanness finding its birthplace in the post war automobile industry and with complex functional shop-floor configurations posing strong impediments to the application of critical lean scheduling and shop-floor control enablers, the lean paradigm was adopted and implemented almost exclusively in repetitive production systems utilising flow-shop layout configurations. This research employs state-of- the-art agent-based simulation to apply lean scheduling principles and techniques on the shop-floor control of job-shops with functional layouts. The modelled system is a dynamic job-shop environment with stochastic order arrivals and processing times employing a variety of dispatching rules. The system's performance under push and global pull constant work-in-progress (CONWIP) control is studied in terms of a number of time, due date and work-in-progress related performance metrics.