Design and Implementation of a Service-based Scheduling Component for Complex Manufacturing Systems

摘要

Scheduling is highly desirable in complex manufacturing systems. However, there is still a mismatch between academic scheduling research, the scheduling solutions offered by software vendors, and the requirements of real-world scheduling applications. In this paper, we describe the design and the development of a scheduling component prototype that is based on web services. It exploits the idea of a hierarchical decomposition of the overall scheduling problem allowing the integration of different problem-specific scheduling algorithms for sub-problems. We discuss how appropriate services can be identified and implemented and how the resulting scheduling component can be used to extend the functionality offered by manufacturing execution systems (MESs).