Application of local clustering organization to reactive job-shop scheduling

Abstract

This study focuses on the reactive scheduling in manufacturing systems. In practical situations, the predetermined schedule often changes under the influence of the unpredictable or variable environment in the factory. The reactive scheduling (RS) is a methodology to modify the predetermined schedule to cope with variable situations without suspending the proceeding of the processes on the schedule. Therefore, the RS requires a method to improve the schedule with fast computational time. To obtain an effective method for the RS, this paper proposes a novel RS method using local clustering organization. Also, this paper examines its effectiveness by a numerical experiment. Our results suggest that the proposed method is more effective than the method using genetic algorithm.