Robust scheduling and dispatching rules for high-mix collaborative manufacturing systems

Motivated by the increasing demand of mass customisation in production systems, this paper proposes a robust and adaptive scheduling and dispatching method for high-mix human-robot collaborative manufacturing facilities. Scheduling and dispatching rules are derived to optimally track the desired production within the mix, while handling uncertainty in job processing times. The sequencing policy is dynamically adjusted by online forecasting the throughput of the facility as a function of the scheduling and dispatching rules. Numerical verification experiments confirm the possibility to accurately track highly variable production requests, despite the uncertainty of the system.