Initial research on schedule interface with shop floor control system

This paper investigates the integration of scheduling with a shop floor control system in general, and a simulation-based shop floor control system in particular. Simplifications and assumptions made in traditional operations scheduling, such as disregarding material handling and buffers, have created questions concerning the fidelity of scheduling and implementing them in production systems. Since the simulation is used as an online task generator in a simulation-based control system, invalid schedules cause catastrophic results or system deadlocking (blocking) on the shop floor. In this paper, the assumptions made in scheduling are investigated in order to determine if schedules can be actually implemented as intended. In addition, two prominent scheduling algorithms, Johnson´s algorithm and Jackson´s algorithm, are investigated to determine whether and in what conditions they work properly