Analysing a meta-model for production scheduling in different kind of flow shop configurations

Abstract

Meta-models enable to introduce dynamism and flexibility while trying to develop tools for solving a widened set of problems in a given application domain, which is considered nowadays to be of upmost importance, in the current Industry 4.0 era, and its underlying Cyber Physical Production Systems. In this paper a meta-model about flow shop scheduling problems is proposed, which enables to solve scheduling problems occurring in different kind of flow shop configurations through simulation. A comparative performance analysis of the scheduling results obtained considering the different types of flow shop configurations is carried out in this paper, based on the use of diverse kind of dispatching rules and flow shop performance evaluation parameters in order to realize about the utility of the proposed meta-model, for instance for proposing the best suited flow shop configuration in a given industrial scenario.