Coupling of centralized and decentralized scheduling for robust production in agile production systems

Abstract Individualized products and timely delivery require agile just-in-time manufacturing operations. Scheduling needs to deliver a robust performance with high and stable results even when facing disruptions such as machine failures. Existing approaches often generate predictive schedules and adjust them reactively as disturbances occur. However, the effectiveness of rescheduling approaches highly depends on the available degrees of freedom in the predictive schedule. In the proposed approach, a centralized robust scheduling procedure is coupled with a decentralized reinforcement learning algorithm in order to adjust the required degrees of freedom for a maximally efficient production control in real-time.