Lessons learned for building agile and flexible scheduling tool for turbulent environments in the extended enterprise

This paper presents results of a 2.5-year, multidisciplinary, university–industry collaborative effort investigating design of “Internet-based Scheduler for material Optimisation and agile ProducTion In MUlti-Site enterprises in agile manufacturing” (IS-OPTIMUS), a four nation collaborative project aimed at improvements in turbulent manufacturing environments. The focus of this paper is specifically on the content of the work carried out, along with the main benefits and results. Key to achieving the goals is following a complete project-life-cycle path from the initial stages where the industrial users requirements were identified and the system specification took place to the development and tuning of the final system. Design choices for software must strike a balance between the user flexibility required and the representing environment constraints, i.e. finite capacity scheduling, which takes production requirements from existing production planning systems, to schedule production resources like plant workers, critical tools and machines. The system consists of a material optimiser working closely with the finite capacity scheduler and a dynamic scheduler providing automatic reaction to real-time exceptions, thus deriving in solutions of higher performance.