Adaptive Scheduling and Control of One-of-a-Kind Production

As a typical manufacturing paradigm, one-of-a-kind production (OKP) challenges production scheduling and control differently than mass production. High throughput in OKP is a typical example of mass customization, which is one of the important strategies in the current economy where the objective is to maximize the customer satisfaction by producing highly customized products with near mass production efficiency. As mentioned frequently in this book, OKP is intensely customer focused such that every product is based on specific customer requirements, and products differ on matters of colors, shapes, dimensions, functionalities, materials, processing times, etc. Consequently, a product that is produced on an OKP flow line is rarely repeated.