Web-based Multi-functional Scheduling System for a Distributed Manufacturing Environment

Globalized production has become a new trend in the current competitive business environment, especially for the multinational companies in pursuit of lower cost, shorter time-to-market and better quality. For years, much emphasis has been focused on the concurrent design and manufacturing, and other integrated production activities. However, the distributed production scheduling, a post-design procedure playing a very crucial role in the whole process of production, has not received sufficient attention. Comparing with traditional single-factory or single-jobshop scheduling, the distributed scheduling is uneasy to manage and the information exchange between different scheduling participants is much more complex. This paper reports a web-based system to enable production scheduling for the distributed manufacturing environment with the utilization of the latest Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) technology. A Genetic Algorithm (GA), which involves once gene crossover and twice gene mutation, is adopted as the scheduling kernel to make distributed scheduling optimization. The entire web-based scheduling system includes three layers, i.e., stand-alone application module, scheduling agent module, and e-scheduling module. They are implemented using Java Application and Applet Language. With such a system in place, every manufacturing participant is no longer an isolated production element and the information among the participants can be shared and exchanged in real time. Furthermore, contingencies in any factory such as machine breakdown or design modification can be handled in real time.