Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling, and optimizing work and workloads in a production process or manufacturing process. By doing so, it allows allocating plant resources such as machines and personnel efficiently. Its purpose is to minimize the production time and costs, by telling a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Manufacturing scheduling is an algorithmic planning method to balance production processes and purchase materials against orders and production targets. Traditional production planning uses a stepwise procedure to allocate material and capacity. Although being simple in preparation, this approach often turns out to be sub-optimal: It does not readily adapt to changes in demand, resource capacity or material availability. Elements of production are projected separately, and often material or capacity constraints are not considered sufficiently, leading to infeasible or sub-optimal plans.
Within the thesis or student project, you shall develop, analyze and compare schedule optimization techniques. Methods will be explored for different industries such as high-mix semiconductor or automotive. Data, parameters, a detailed process description as well as a simulation model of the area were worked out independently together with an industrial manufacturing partner of SYSTEMA, and will be provided to you.
Technologies: Constraint Solvers, R, Python, Java, Kotlin