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Natural sciences
- Operations research and mathematical programming
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Engineering and technology
- Computer integrated manufacturing
In recent years, the manufacturing industry is confronted with a significant trend towards mass customization. This leads to increasing product variability, smaller batch size, while lead times should be reduced and production cost limited. In these High-Mix Low-Volume production systems, human operators are and will continue to fulfil a key role. For this type of flexible production systems, human-centered, agile planning and scheduling solutions are crucial to guarantee i) operational efficiency and robustness against all types of operational uncertainty and disturbances and ii) growth of the human capital and operator well-being. However, until today, it is still common practice for scheduling to be performed manually, relying on intangible expert knowledge and yielding suboptimal schedules, an inability to react in agile way on unforeseen events or to take operators’ competences and capacities correctly into account. To overcome this, 24Flow, Bewel, Mariasteen, SABCA Lummen, Solvice, Ometa and Flanders Make will join forces in the Schedule4FMS project and explore an IoT-enabled human-centered scheduling solution improving agility of flexible manufacturing environments. This solution will include AI services to i) identify data-driven prediction models for task durations and subsequently ii) to compute actionable schedules based on the actual status of the manufacturing system, taking these prediction models and operators’ capabilities and capacities into account. These methods will combine proactive and reactive scheduling methods to obtain the required agility and robustness against disturbances occurring in the manufacturing system. Intuitive interfaces will allow defining the scheduling problem and visualize the results for planners, method engineers and line managers, operators or sales managers. The Schedule4FMS results will be validated on a demonstrator case at the Flanders Make flexible assembly infrastructure (Infraflex lab) and on four industrial pilots.