A Production Control System with Application to Job Shop Just-In-Time Manufacturing

摘要

Along the production chain where each workshop does a part of the work such as material examination, product processing, testing, and packaging, each workshop should try to deliver jobs to its successor workshop at a right time so that the successor workshop will neither wait idly for the jobs to come nor have to hold a huge inventory of the jobs already come. In other words, efficient and cost-effective production can only be ensured when the job delivery time of each workshop can well match the processing speed of its successor workshop. Apart from production, the same holds true for multi-stage document processing, multi-person task flow, etc. To solve these problems, this paper presents a control system which can guide each job (document or task) to a realtime best worker where the job is most likely to be finished and delivered just in time for the next workshop. The presented system is driven by heuristic control combined with multi-agent feedbacks. The application of the system to a real factory has been tested and the analysis of results and problems are given in detail, which hopefully can be a good reference for future researches or applications of similar characters.