An industry 4.0 oriented tool for supporting dynamic selection of dispatching rules based on Kano model satisfaction scheduling

Abstract

Production scheduling is an optimizing problem that can contribute strongly to the competitive capacity of companies producing goods and services. A way to promote the survival and the sustainability of the organizations in this upcoming era of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is the efficient use of the resources. A complete failure to stage tasks properly can easily lead to a waste of time and resources, which could result in a low level of productivity and high monetary losses. In view of the above, it is essential to analyse and continuously develop new models of production scheduling. This paper intends to present an I4.0 oriented decision support tool to the dynamic scheduling. After a fist solution has been generated, the developed prototype has the ability to create new solutions as tasks leave the system and new ones arrive, in order to minimize a certain measure of performance. Using a single machine environment, the proposed prototype was validated in an in-depth computational study through several instances of dynamic problems with stochastic characteristics. Moreover, a more robust analysis was done, which demonstrated that there is statistical evidence that the proposed prototype performance is better than single method of scheduling and proved the effectiveness of the prototype.