Decentralised, multi-objective driven scheduling for reentrant shops: a conceptual development and a test case

This paper presents a new approach to the scheduling of reentrant shops. Its main innovative principle is an objective driven engine: jobs to be processed are selected on the basis of a balanced evaluation of how well they fulfill efficiency and effectiveness objectives. This new approach relies on a heuristic algorithm build upon a decentralised architecture, in which each production resource can act as an independent decider and selects the jobs to process according to dynamically changing criteria and to widely shared information. Interesting performances, as well as robustness and real life suitability, have been highlighted through an extensive test phase based on real data collected during two case studies, belonging to semiconductors and metalworking businesses.