Coordination of Distributed Production Planning and Scheduling Systems

In this paper, the requirements of industrial solutions to plant-wide planning and scheduling problems are discussed. The state-of-the-art algorithms for the coordination of local schedulers are reviewed and a new heuristic method is presented that utilizes the existing distributed scheduling algorithms by considering the coupled due dates and release dates in the distributed schedulers and by penalizing the slacks between the individual optimized schedules and the linking variables iteratively. The performance of the proposed coordination algorithm is evaluated for a prototypical distributed production scheduling problem which consists of two MILP scheduling models. The numerical results show that the proposed coordination scheme is superior compared to fully decentralized and to centralized scheduling algorithms and to other cooperative scheduling methods with respect to solution quality and computational effort.