EPO Extension of Dispatching Rules to Minimize Effects of Time Uncertainty in Production Scheduling

The increasingly widespread concept of Industry 4.0 and Digital Twins, as well as the competitive global markets, make it essential to produce goods in a timely and cost-effective manner. Therefore, one of the most important requirements for current production scheduling systems is to automate the control of production progress and to quickly correct schedules in response to feedback from production machines while minimizing the number of changes in the order of tasks to be performed. In this paper, we propose a new extension to the dispatching rules, which takes into account the uncertainty of job processing times and allows for the production of robust schedules. The important feature of the proposed extension is that it does not increase the computational time of the underlying techniques, i.e., it has no negative impact on their most important advantage over other production scheduling algorithms. The results obtained from the real data of a large international offset printing company with various machine and job heterogeneities confirm the effectiveness of the proposed EPO extension in producing schedules that are indeed robust to changes in production time.