Hierarchical Task Model for Resource Failure Recovery in Production Scheduling

Abstract

Attaining optimal results in real-life scheduling is hindered by a number of problems. One such problem is dynamics of manufacturing environments with breaking-down resources and hot orders coming during the schedule execution. A traditional approach to react to unexpected events occurring on the shop floor is generating a new schedule from scratch. Complete rescheduling, however, may require excessive computation time. Moreover, the recovered schedule may deviate a lot from the ongoing schedule. Some works have focused on tackling these shortcomings, but none of the existing approaches tries to substitute jobs that cannot be executed with a set of alternative jobs. This paper describes the scheduling model suitable for dealing with unforeseen events using the possibility of alternative processes and proposes an efficient heuristic-based approach to recover an ongoing schedule from a resource failure.