Architecture of manufacturing scheduling systems: Literature review and an integrated proposal

Abstract

This paper deals with the development of customised and realistic manufacturing scheduling systems. More specifically, we focus onto a key element that may help driving their efficient design and implementation: i.e., the set of building blocks that should include a generic scheduling system and its interconnections, a set collectively known as the architecture of a system. To do so, we first analyse existing contributions on the topic together with papers describing different functional requirements of scheduling systems. These contributions are then discussed and classified, and a modular architecture for manufacturing scheduling systems is proposed. This proposal updates, extends and refines the well-known architecture proposed earlier by Pinedo and Yen’s [Pinedo, M.L., Yen, B.P.-C., 1997. On the design and development of object-oriented scheduling systems. Annals of Operations Research 70 (1), 359–378], and serves to integrate the different requirements identified in the literature review.

Introduction

While the literature on manufacturing scheduling models and solution procedures is extensive, very little has been written on how to bring these models and procedures into practice. This has given rise to the so-called “gap” between the theory and practice of scheduling (MacCarthy and Liu, 1993), which has been widely documented in several studies, such as e.g., Ford et al., 1987, McKay et al., 1988, Olhager and Rapp, 1995, Graves, 1981, Dudek et al., 1992, McKay et al., 2002. In a quantitative study about scheduling research carried out by Reisman et al. (1997), from a total of 184 reviewed papers, only 5 (less than a 3%) dealt with realistic production settings.

In order to close this gap between scheduling models and procedures, and their implementation in a real manufacturing setting, the former should be translated into a system supporting scheduling decisions in a company, i.e., a piece of software with a number of functions to support scheduling. This implies carrying out a software development process to obtain a final product, i.e., a scheduling system at work. In such software development process, there are a number of technical, human and organisational issues which are critical and should be adequately managed to ensure a successful result. Among the different activities that must be carried out in the development of a manufacturing scheduling system, one of utmost importance is the design of the architecture of the system, as it largely influences the system’s subsequent detailed design and implementation. Moreover, parts of this architecture are common to most manufacturing scheduling systems, so relying on an effective, validated architecture helps reducing the usually costly and time-consuming development process while ensuring the quality of the resulting scheduling system.

Despite the importance of the architecture of manufacturing scheduling systems, scheduling research has often overlooked this topic, as the related literature is scarce and does not provide developers with a comprehensive view of the scheduling system, which clearly contributes to widen the aforementioned gap.

Our paper is aimed towards this important issue. To do so, we first review the existing literature in order to identify contributions regarding descriptions of the architecture of manufacturing scheduling systems, as well as works describing the functionalities to be embedded in such systems. We then propose an architecture for manufacturing scheduling systems that updates, extends and integrates the most relevant issues extracted from the analysis of the literature and those observed in practice. By doing so, our work intends to have a twofold contribution: On one hand we review and classify the contributions in the topic, while on the other hand we present an architecture for scheduling systems which extends the current descriptions and that is based on real developments. While we do not claim that the proposed architecture is universally valid nor should be strictly followed, we hope that it will help directing the design of scheduling models towards a greater applicability.

The remainder of the paper is as follows: in Section 2, we analyse the existing literature dealing with the structure and requirements of scheduling systems. Section 3 is devoted to providing a detailed discussion on the different functionalities of a scheduling system according to the analysis carried out in the previous section. In Section 4, we propose an architecture of scheduling systems covering the most relevant issues extracted from the analysis carried out in the previous section. The paper ends by drawing some conclusions and pointing out future research lines.