AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends

The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested

Partial flexible job shop scheduling considering preventive maintenance and priorities

[EN] In this paper, a new mathematical programming model is proposed for a partial flexible job shop scheduling problem with an integrated solution approach. The purpose of this model is the assignment of production operations to machines with the goal of simultaneously minimizing operating costs and penalties. These penalties include delayed delivery, deviation from a fixed time point for preventive maintenance, and deviation from the priorities of each machine. Considering the priorities for machines in partial flexible job shop scheduling problems can be a contribution in closer to the reality of production systems. For validation and evaluation of the effectiveness of the model, several numerical examples are solved by using the Baron solver in GAMS. Sensitivity analysis is performed for the model parameters. The results further indicate the relationship between scheduling according to priorities of each machine and production scheduling.Farahani, A.; Tohidi, H.; Khalaj, M.; Shoja, A. (2020). Partial flexible job shop scheduling considering preventive maintenance and priorities. WPOM-Working Papers on Operations Management. 11(2):27-48. https://doi.org/10.4995/wpom.v11i2.14187OJS274811

Two stage Indian food grain supply chain network transportation-allocation model

This paper investigates the food grain supply chain, transportation allocation problem of Indian Public Distribution System (PDS). The different activities of Indian food grain supply chain are procurements, storage, movement, transportation and distribution. We have developed a mixed integer nonlinear programming model (MINLP) to minimize the transportation, inventory and operational cost of shipping food grains from the cluster of procurement centers of producing states to the consuming state warehouses. A recently developed chemical reaction optimization (CRO) algorithm is used for testing the model which gives the superior computational performance compared to other metaheuristics

Intelligent systems in manufacturing: current developments and future prospects

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are demanding increasing changes in manufacturing environments. Enterprises are required to constantly redesign their products and continuously reconfigure their manufacturing systems. Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems do not fully satisfy this new situation. Many authors have proposed that artificial intelligence will bring the flexibility and efficiency needed by manufacturing systems. This paper is a review of artificial intelligence techniques used in manufacturing systems. The paper first defines the components of a simplified intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), the different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to be considered and then shows how these AI techniques are used for the components of IMS

An elitist quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem

The flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is vital to manufacturers especially in today’s constantly changing environment. It is a strongly NP-hard problem and therefore metaheuristics or heuristics are usually pursued to solve it. Most of the existing metaheuristics and heuristics, however, have low efficiency in convergence speed. To overcome this drawback, this paper develops an elitist quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm. The algorithm aims to minimise the maximum completion time (makespan). It performs a global search with the quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm and a local search with a method that is inspired by the motion mechanism of the electrons around an atomic nucleus. Three novel algorithms are proposed and their effect on the whole search is discussed. The elitist strategy is adopted to prevent the optimal solution from being destroyed during the evolutionary process. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the best-known algorithms for FJSPs on most of the FJSP benchmarks

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Spring Symposium on Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning

The symposium presented issues involved in the development of scheduling systems that can deal with resource and time limitations. To qualify, a system must be implemented and tested to some degree on non-trivial problems (ideally, on real-world problems). However, a system need not be fully deployed to qualify. Systems that schedule actions in terms of metric time constraints typically represent and reason about an external numeric clock or calendar and can be contrasted with those systems that represent time purely symbolically. The following topics are discussed: integrating planning and scheduling; integrating symbolic goals and numerical utilities; managing uncertainty; incremental rescheduling; managing limited computation time; anytime scheduling and planning algorithms, systems; dependency analysis and schedule reuse; management of schedule and plan execution; and incorporation of discrete event techniques

Dynamic Scheduling for Maintenance Tasks Allocation supported by Genetic Algorithms

Since the first factories were created, man has always tried to maximize its production and, consequently, his profits. However, the market demands have changed and nowadays is not so easy to get the maximum yield of it. The production lines are becoming more flexible and dynamic and the amount of information going through the factory is growing more and more. This leads to a scenario where errors in the production scheduling may occur often. Several approaches have been used over the time to plan and schedule the shop-floor’s production. However, some of them do not consider some factors present in real environments, such as the fact that the machines are not available all the time and need maintenance sometimes. This increases the complexity of the system and makes it harder to allocate the tasks competently. So, more dynamic approaches should be used to explore the large search spaces more efficiently. In this work is proposed an architecture and respective implementation to get a schedule including both production and maintenance tasks, which are often ignored on the related works. It considers the maintenance shifts available. The proposed architecture was implemented using genetic algorithms, which already proved to be good solving combinatorial problems such as the Job-Shop Scheduling problem. The architecture considers the precedence order between the tasks of a same product and the maintenance shifts available on the factory. The architecture was tested on a simulated environment to check the algorithm behavior. However, it was used a real data set of production tasks and working stations

Approaches of production planning and control under Industry 4.0: A literature review

Purpose: Industry 4.0 technologies significantly impact how production is planned, scheduled, and controlled. Literature provides different classifications of the tasks and functions of production planning and control (PPC) like the German Aachen PPC model. This research aims to identify and classify current Industry 4.0 approaches for planning and controlling production processes and to reveal researched and unexplored areas of the model. It extends a reduced version that has been published previously in Procedia Computer Science (Herrmann, Tackenberg, Padoano & Gamber, 2021) by presenting and discussing its results in more detail. Design/methodology/approach: In an exploratory literature review, we review and classify 48 publications on a full-text basis with the Aachen PPC model’s tasks and functions. Two cluster analyses reveal researched and unexplored tasks and functions of the Aachen PPC model. Findings: We propose a cyber-physical PPC architecture, which incorporates current Industry 4.0 technologies, current optimization methods, optimization objectives, and disturbances relevant for realizing a PPC system in a smart factory. Current approaches mainly focus on production control using real-time information from the shop floor, part of in-house PPC. We discuss the different layers of the cyber-physical PPC architecture and propose future research directions for the unexplored tasks and functions of the Aachen PPC model. Research limitations/implications: Limitations are the strong dependence of results on search terms used and the subjective eligibility assessment and assignment of publications to the Aachen PPC model. The selection of search terms and the texts’ interpretation is based on an individual’s assessment. The revelation of unexplored tasks and functions of the Aachen PPC model might have a different outcome if the search term combination is parameterized differently. Originality/value: Using the Aachen PPC model, which holistically models PPC, the findings give comprehensive insights into the current advances of tools, methods, and challenges relevant to planning and controlling production processes under Industry 4.0Peer Reviewe