【Time】13:30-14:30, October 28,  2010 (Thursday)

 【Venue】Room 510, Shunde Building

 【Speaker】Mr. Wei Li, Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

 【Title】 One-of-a-Kind Production Scheduling and Control- Basic Methods and Heuristics

 【Abstract】

One-of-a-kind production (OKP) has distinctive characteristics, different from those of mass production.  Therefore, OKP challenges production scheduling differently from the traditional mass production, especially it demands adaptive production scheduling and control due to frequent unexpected disturbances in OKP. Even though research in flow shop production scheduling has been carried out for many decades, and there are many heuristics proposed in the literature, most existing heuristics are not suitable for adaptive production scheduling and control in OKP, since nearly all of these heuristics have been developed for offline production scheduling problems, not for online re-scheduling problems, i.e. adaptive production control. Thus, there is still a gap between the theoretical research on production scheduling and control and industrial applications. This thesis presents a computer-aided production scheduling and control system, which includes two heuristics, i.e. the average processing time and lever (APT-LVR) and the state space (SS) heuristics, and a feedback control structure. Through a series of case studies, including an industrial implementation in Gienow Windows and Doors Ltd, Calgary, Canada, the proposed computer-aided production scheduling and control system demonstrates a potential to improve production efficiency. Moreover, the state space concept, based on which the SS heuristic is developed, reveals more properties of flow shop production scheduling problems, providing another angle to develop heuristics suitable for adaptive production scheduling and control in OKP. In general, this thesis partially fills up the gap between theoretical research and industrial application.