Production plan scheduling on SMT manufacturing lines

The assembly order of production jobs (batches) is determined by specific scheduling algorithms for SMT manufacturing lines. While scheduling itself is a complex and rather time consuming task, appearing new orders or changing production conditions during the assembly may require a new scheduling. This paper introduces a new approach which supports such production plan re-scheduling for SMT manufacturing lines. The scheduling of assembly on the SMT manufacturing line is modelled by the job-shop scheduling problem in our method. However, our approach is based on the smart re-usage of former production plans (existing assembly scheduling) instead of calculating a new schedule from the raw input data. While the computational complexity (i.e. computational run-time) of rescheduling may grow exponentially in this latter case, our method provides a solution in a linear run-time. This means that it takes only a few seconds to get the new production plan; contrary to the scheduling process calculating from the raw data which cloud take even several hours.