Adaptive Production Scheduling and Control in One-Of-A-Kind Production

Mass customization is one of competitive strategies in modern manufacturing (Blecker & Friedrich, 2006), the objective of which is to maximize customer satisfaction by producing highly customized products with high production efficiency. There are two starting points moving towards mass customization, mass production and one-of-a-kind production (OKP). The production volume of mass production is normally large, whereas that of OKP is usually small or extremely even just one. Mass production can achieve high production efficiency but relatively low customization, because products are designed in terms of standard product families, and produced repetitively in large volume. Comparatively, OKP can achieve high customization but relatively low production efficiency, because product design in OKP is highly customer involved, and each customer has different requirements. Therefore, the variation of customer requirements causes differences on each product. To improve production efficiency, OKP companies use mixed-product production on a flow line (Dean et al., 2008, 2009). Moreover, the production scheduling and control on OKP shop floors is severely challenged by the variation of customer requirements, whereas that in mass production is comparatively simple. Therefore, we focus on the adaptive production scheduling and control for OKP.