Integrating labor awareness to energy-efficient production scheduling under real-time electricity pricing : an empirical study

With the penetration of smart grid into factories, energy-efficient production scheduling has emerged as a promising method for industrial demand response. It shifts flexible production loads to lower-priced periods to reduce energy cost for the same production task. However, the existing methods only focus on integrating energy awareness to conventional production scheduling models. They ignore the labor cost which is shift-based and follows an opposite trend of energy cost. For instance, the energy cost is lower during nights while the labor cost is higher. Therefore, this paper proposes a method for energy-efficient and labor-aware production scheduling at the unit process level. This integrated scheduling model is mathematically formulated. Besides the state-based energy model and genetic algorithm-based optimization, a continuous-time shift accumulation heuristic is proposed to synchronize power states and labor shifts. In a case study of a Belgian plastic bottle manufacturer, a set of empirical sensitivity analyses were performed to investigate the impact of energy and labor awareness, as well as the production-related factors that influence the economic performance of a schedule. Furthermore, the demonstration was performed in 9 large-scale test instances, which encompass the cases where energy cost is minor, moderate, and major compared to the joint energy and labor cost. The results have proven that the ignorance of labor in existing energy-efficient production scheduling studies increases the joint energy and labor cost, although the energy cost can be minimized. To achieve effective production cost reduction, energy and labor awareness are recommended to be jointly considered in production scheduling. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Energy efficiency in discrete-manufacturing systems: insights, trends, and control strategies

Since the depletion of fossil energy sources, rising energy prices, and governmental regulation restrictions, the current manufacturing industry is shifting towards more efficient and sustainable systems. This transformation has promoted the identification of energy saving opportunities and the development of new technologies and strategies oriented to improve the energy efficiency of such systems. This paper outlines and discusses most of the research reported during the last decade regarding energy efficiency in manufacturing systems, the current technologies and strategies to improve that efficiency, identifying and remarking those related to the design of management/control strategies. Based on this fact, this paper aims to provide a review of strategies for reducing energy consumption and optimizing the use of resources within a plant into the context of discrete manufacturing. The review performed concerning the current context of manufacturing systems, control systems implemented, and their transformation towards Industry 4.0 might be useful in both the academic and industrial dimension to identify trends and critical points and suggest further research lines.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Production Scheduling Requirements to Smart Manufacturing

The production scheduling has attracted a lot of researchers for many years, however most of the approaches are not targeted to deal with real manufacturing environments, and those that are, are very particular for the case study. It is crucial to consider important features related with the factories, such as products and machines characteristics and unexpected disturbances, but also information such as when the parts arrive to the factory and when should be delivered. So, the purpose of this paper is to identify some important characteristics that have been considered independently in a lot of studies and that should be considered together to develop a generic scheduling framework to be used in a real manufacturing environment.authorsversionpublishe

Scheduling in the industry 4.0: a systematic literature review

Industry 4.0 is characterised for being a new way of organising the supply chains, coordinating smart factories that should be capable of a higher adaptivity, making them more responsive to a continuously changing demand. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with three main objectives. First, to identify in the literature on Industry 4.0, the need for new job scheduling methods for the factories of the digital era. Second, to identify in the literature of scheduling, which of these issues have been accomplished and what are the most critical gaps. Third, to propose a new research agenda on scheduling methodology, that fulfils the needs of scheduling in the field of Industry 4.0. The results show that literature related to the subject of study is rapidly growing and the needs of new methods for job scheduling in the digital factories concern two main ideas. First, the need to create and implement a digital architecture where data can be appropriately processed and second, the need of giving a decentralised machine scheduling solution inside such a framework. Although we can find some studies on small production lines, research with practical results remains scarce in the literature to date

Smart digital twin for ZDM-based job-shop scheduling

[EN] The growing digitization of manufacturing processes is revolutionizing the production job-shop by leading it toward the Smart Manufacturing (SM) paradigm. For a process to be smart, it is necessary to combine a given blend of data technologies, information and knowledge that enable it to perceive its environment and to autonomously perform actions that maximize its success possibilities in its assigned tasks. Of all the different ways leading to this transformation, both the generation of virtual replicas of processes and applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques provide a wide range of possibilities whose exploration is today a far from negligible sources of opportunities to increase industrial companies¿ competitiveness. As a complex manufacturing process, production order scheduling in the job-shop is a necessary scenario to act by implementing these technologies. This research work considers an initial conceptual smart digital twin (SDT) framework for scheduling job-shop orders in a zero-defect manufacturing (ZDM) environment. The SDT virtually replicates the job-shop scheduling issue to simulate it and, based on the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methodology, trains a prescriber agent and a process monitor. This simulation and training setting will facilitate analyses, optimization, defect and failure avoidance and, in short, decision making, to improve job-shop scheduling.The research that led to these results received funding from the European Union H2020 Programme with grant agreement No. 825631 Zero-Defect Manufacturing Platform (ZDMP) and Grant agreement No. 958205 Industrial Data Services for Quality Control in Smart Manufacturing (i4Q), and from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities with Grant Agreement RTI2018-101344-B-I00 "Optimisation of zero-defects production technologies enabling supply chains 4.0 (CADS4.0)"Serrano Ruiz, JC.; Mula, J.; Poler, R. (2021). Smart digital twin for ZDM-based job-shop scheduling. IEEE. 510-515. https://doi.org/10.1109/MetroInd4.0IoT51437.2021.948847351051

Scheduling Algorithms: Challenges Towards Smart Manufacturing

Collecting, processing, analyzing, and driving knowledge from large-scale real-time data is now realized with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL). The breakthrough of Industry 4.0 lays a foundation for intelligent manufacturing. However, implementation challenges of scheduling algorithms in the context of smart manufacturing are not yet comprehensively studied. The purpose of this study is to show the scheduling No.s that need to be considered in the smart manufacturing paradigm. To attain this objective, the literature review is conducted in five stages using publish or perish tools from different sources such as Scopus, Pubmed, Crossref, and Google Scholar. As a result, the first contribution of this study is a critical analysis of existing production scheduling algorithms\u27 characteristics and limitations from the viewpoint of smart manufacturing. The other contribution is to suggest the best strategies for selecting scheduling algorithms in a real-world scenario

Job shop scheduling model for a sustainable manufacturing

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