Scheduling of deadlock and failure-prone automated manufacturing systems via hybrid heuristic search

Abstract

This work focuses on the scheduling problem of deadlock and failure-prone automated manufacturing systems, and presents a new scheduling method by combining a robust supervisory control policy and hybrid heuristic search. It aims to minimise makespan, i.e. the completion time of the last part. Based on the extended reach ability graph of the system, it establishes a new heuristic function and two dispatching rules to guide the search process for a schedule. By embedding a robust supervisory control policy into the search process, it develops a polynomial robust dynamic window search algorithm. Failure and repair events of unreliable resources may occur during the execution of a schedule obtained by the proposed algorithm and may make the schedule infeasible. To reduce the influence caused by them and ensure all parts to be finished, this work proposes two event-driven strategies. The first one suspends the execution of the parts requiring failed resources and those to be started until all failed resources are repaired and permits only those parts that have already been processed on working machines to be completed. The second one invokes the proposed algorithm to obtain a new schedule at the vertex generated after a resource failure or repair event and executes the new schedule. Both strategies are effective while the latter performs better at the expense of more computation.

Keywords:

• automated manufacturing system
• robust supervisory control policy
• heuristic search
• scheduling
• rescheduling

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the editor, associate editor, and all anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions that greatly helped improve the presentation and technical quality of this paper.