Smart scheduling solution for human-operated flexible manufacturing environment (Schedule4FMS_ICON) (Schedule4FMS)

In  recent  years, the manufacturing  industry is confronted  with a  significant  trend  towards  mass customization.  This  leads  to increasing  product  variability,  smaller  batch  size,  while  lead  times  should  be reduced and production cost limited. In these High-Mix Low-Volume production systems, human operators are and will continue to fulfil a key role. For this  type of flexible production  systems, human-centered,  agile planning  and scheduling solutions are crucial to guarantee i) operational efficiency and robustness against all types of operational uncertainty and disturbances and ii) growth  of  the human capital and  operator  well-being. However,  until  today,  it  is  still common  practice for scheduling to  be performed  manually,  relying  on  intangible  expert  knowledge  and yielding suboptimal schedules, an inability to react in agile way on unforeseen events or to take operators’ competences and capacities correctly into account. To overcome this, 24Flow, Bewel, Mariasteen, SABCA Lummen, Solvice, Ometa and Flanders Make will join forces  in the  Schedule4FMS  project and explore an IoT-enabled human-centered scheduling solution improving agility of flexible manufacturing environments. This solution will include AI services to i) identify data-driven prediction models for task  durations and  subsequently ii)  to compute  actionable  schedules based  on  the  actual  status  of  the  manufacturing  system, taking these  prediction  models and  operators’ capabilities  and capacities into  account. These  methods  will combine proactive  and  reactive  scheduling methods to obtain the required agility and robustness against disturbances occurring in the manufacturing system. Intuitive interfaces will allow defining the scheduling problem and visualize the results for planners, method  engineers  and  line  managers,  operators  or  sales  managers.  The  Schedule4FMS  results  will  be validated on a demonstrator case at the Flanders Make flexible assembly infrastructure (Infraflex lab) and on four industrial pilots.