Subventions et des contributions :

Subvention ou bourse octroyée s'appliquant à plus d'un exercice financier. (2017-2018 à 2022-2023)

Manufacturing is the most important wealth-generating sector of the Canadian economy. However, this very important economic sector is facing intense global competitions. To be successful in this competitive climate, manufacturers require significantly improved capabilities. Technology, in the form of equipment and automation, has always been a means to competitiveness. However, an equally important and a determining avenue to competitiveness is the way we organize facilities, plan production and schedule operations. Production planning and scheduling has become a necessity for survival and its importance cannot be overstated. It is a critical decision making process of allocating limited resources to tasks over time, while a large number of time and relationship constraints among the activities and resources are being satisfied. Indeed, it
ultimately determines the operational performance of a manufacturing system.

It is also one of the very difficult optimization problems known to the research community and has been an active field of research. Countless number of articles are published in the area. However, very little has been written on how to bring theoretical research into practice. Perhaps the research community has over-emphasized the mathematical rigor at the cost of under-emphasizing real implementations. One major problem in translating scheduling algorithms to real systems is that most algorithms are framework specific such as job-shop or flow-shop which rarely match real systems. In this research, we will attempt to develop a framework and a scheduling methodology that can be applied to a wider range of manufacturing industries. This will enable industries adopt automated scheduling tools without the need to develop costly specialized algorithms. Another major limitation of scheduling algorithms in literature is that most of them are designed to solve mathematical models that assume static conditions. However, manufacturing systems operate in dynamic/stochastic environments where frequent unpredictable real-time events occur making a previously feasible schedule infeasible and obsolete. Examples of such real-time events include machine failures, arrival of urgent jobs, cancellation of orders, due date changes, operator absentee etc. To address this problem, in this research, a unified supervisory control and dynamic schedule tool will be developed. While working in developing generalized scheduling methodologies which are the main thrust of this proposal, many specialized algorithms (different from standard research problems) will also be developed for specific scheduling requirements in collaboration with local industries. Consequently, this proposal and the research program brings ample training opportunities for many graduate and undergraduate students in advanced planning, scheduling and controlling of complex industrial systems.