Towards flexible RFID event-driven integrated manufacturing for make-to-order production

ABSTRACT Global competition and the growing need for rapid responsiveness of customers’ orders necessitate the integration of planning, scheduling and control in manufacturing systems. This paper proposes an RFID event-driven integrated production planning and control (RED-IPPC) framework for such a need in a make-to-order Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) – based production environment. Flexible Job-shop scheduling problems are used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework by solving static schedules via optimisation algorithms and dynamic schedule via complex event processing (CEP) and heuristic rules if predefined operations deviate from the planned schedule under disturbances. And CEP is adopted to deal with real time RFID data. Simulation with ARENA and experiments based on the Rifidi Edge Serve are used to validate such applications. The use of RFID combined with CEP offers better context awareness and real-time responsiveness in production, and makes the proposed framework in process-linked applications in various systems from flexible manufacturing systems of high automation to those operated manually.