A modular tool for FMS scheduling

Industrial schedulers try to take into account more and more complex aspects of manufacturing and become as a consequence more difficult to use efficiently. We suggest a modular framework in order to support the development of schedulers better adapted to the technological constraints of the manufacturing cell they are used in. In order to decrease the time needed to develop such schedulers, an extensive reuse of past developments is made possible by the object paradigm through the definition of a powerful yet generic data model. A fully modular architecture has been developed thanks to communication standards like CORBA, MMS and STEP. The first scheduler developed within this framework, called TAPAS (the almost perfect approach to scheduling) and used in an industrial context is described.