A multi-objective evolutionary approach to scheduling for evolving manufacturing systems

Persistent trends like quickly changing production programs, increasing customer individual manufacturing and Sustainable Manufacturing create complex systems of objectives in manufacturing control. Service-oriented manufacturing systems and self-optimizing manufacturing resources offer the required flexibility to consider these objectives in accordance with the current organizational and economical situation. On the downside, this increase in flexibility make the control of manufacturing systems more difficult and presents new challenges regarding the scheduling. To meet these challenges, we developed scheduling framework that supports alternative process plans and considers the internal states trajectories of resources. In order to support the user in a complex decision-making environment, evolutionary multi-objective optimization is used to generate a set of relevant schedules and an interface to select the most appropriate schedule is provided.