Distributed Feedback Mechanism for Just-In-Time Scheduling Problem

The problem considered in this research is the just-in-time scheduling of a manufacturing environment that is able to produce several different products. New jobs come randomly into the system, expected to become one of the products. Each job must go through multiple stages before it can be finished as a product. There are multiple machines at each stage, and the processing time of each product on each machine is different. There exits delivery time between stages. Previous researches did much on the static scheduling of such problem by using mixed integer linear programming. However, little efforts have been made on real-time scheduling, which means the release time of jobs is unknown. But such scheduling is becoming more and more important under the increasingly competitive manufacturing market. In this paper, two distributed feedback mechanisms are proposed to solve the realtime scheduling problem of minimizing earliness and tardiness penalties of all jobs. The simulation shows that the proposed distributed feedback mechanisms deliver quite competitive performance for the targeted problem.