Process Planning and Scheduling for Distributed Manufacturing

Manufacturing has been one of the key areas that support and influence a nation’s economy since the 18th century. Today, distributed manufacturing is unforeseeably coming into being due to recent business decentralisation and manufacturing outsourcing. The process planning and scheduling issues of intelligent and distributed manufacturing are crucial nowadays due to the need for enterprises to be adaptive, re-configurable, collaborative and flexible enough to support the emergence of worldwide competition and dynamic and mass-customised markets. With this increasing dynamism of decentralised manufacturing systems and processes, more effective and efficient decision-making techniques are needed. Process Planning and Scheduling for Distributed Manufacturing focuses on emerging technologies for distributed intelligent decision-making in process planning and dynamic scheduling. As a collection of chapters on state-of-the-art researches in this area, this book presents a review of several key research areas in process planning and scheduling (e.g., adaptive process planning, dynamic scheduling, and process planning and scheduling integration), and provides an in-depth treatment of particular techniques, from function block enabled process planning to agent-based resource scheduling. Each chapter addresses a specific problem domain and offers practical solutions to solve the problem. Given the essential role manufacturing plays in the economic development of all industrial nations, Process Planning and Scheduling for Distributed Manufacturing will be of interest to academic researchers, practising engineers and graduate students for whom it will provide a better understanding of the present state and future trends of research in this important area. Manufacturing has been one of the key areas that support and influence a nation’s economy since the 18th century. Being the primary driving force in economic growth, manufacturing constantly serves as the foundation of and contributes to other industries with products ranging from heavy-duty machinery to hi-tech home electronics. In the past centuries, manufacturing has contributed significantly to modern civilisation and created momentum that is used to drive today’s economy. Despite various revolutionary changes and innovations in the 20th century that contributed to manufacturing advancements, we are still facing new challenges when striving to achieve greater success in winning global competitions. Today, distributed manufacturing is unforeseeably coming into being due to recent business decentralisation and manufacturing outsourcing. Manufacturers are competing in a dynamic marketplace that demands short response time to changing markets and agility in production. In the 21st century, manufacturing is gradually shifting to a distributed environment with increasing dynamism. In order to win a competition, locally or globally, customer satisfaction is treated with priority. This leads to mass customisation and even more complex manufacturing processes, from shop floors to every level along manufacturing supply chains. At the same time, outsourcing has forged a multi-tier supplier structure with numerous small-- medium-sized enterprises involved, where highly-mixed products in small batch sizes are handled simultaneously in job-shop operations.