A New HMI Scheduling Model Implemented on a Real Manufacturing Scheduling System

Manufacturing scheduling systems operate in a highly dynamic environment where several perturbations occur during the execution of a schedule. These perturbations prevent the execution of the planned schedule exactly as it was supposed to. To cope with this drawback, some techniques propose several scheduling solutions instead of a unique one, allowing during the execution phase to select the appropriate schedule that hedges against the perturbations. This selection is effectively done by a human operator who plays a key role in decision-making because of his knowledge and expertise. But, because of the limited complexity that he can handle, he needs to cooperate with the machine to take efficient decisions. In this context, the Human-Machine-Interface (HMI) literature research in planning and scheduling is rather theoretical. This paper addresses this relation from a practical-oriented perspective by proposing a new HMI model adapted to the groups of permutable jobs method, which is one of the most used literature methods to cope with shop perturbations. A practical experiment using the proposed HMI is then conducted. The results stress the usability and the limits of the proposed model.