An Operational Model and a Computer Support Environment for Batch Plants Based on Adaptive Scheduling

Abstract

Scheduling is one of the most important feature in production management. Production systems are operated on schedules in order to minimize costs of production and complete production of given demands by their due dates. However, production cannot be often carried out as scheduled because of troubles or accidents such as malfunction of reactors, tardiness of chemical reactions, and so on. Even in such situations, production activities have to be continued with modifying original schedules. As matters stand, such modifications of schedules are carried out depending on human experiences. In this work, an operational model of a production system was considered which is used to continue production under production environments with several uncertainties. First, a computer aided environment of which simulators and schedulers form the core is developed based on the Object-Oriented approach. Next, a series of experiments was carried out using this environment in order to evaluate performances of various parameters used in proposed methods.