Decision making in adaptive manufacturing systems: Multi-objective scheduling and user interface

Adaptive and service-oriented manufacturing proposes manufacturing systems which can be rapidly changed in accordance to changing production programs and customer individual production. Increasing customer specific manufacturing and new trends such as Sustainable Manufacturing create a complex system of objectives. Human dispatcher controlling these manufacturing systems must be properly supported to consider all required objectives. Due to the reduced insight into the adapting manufacturing systems, classical single optimization approaches with a rigid definition of a single objective function and hard optimization constraints are not appropriate any more. This paper introduces a decision making framework based on multi-objective scheduling. The decision making process consists of a multi-objective scheduling process and an interface for schedule selection. The interface combines the decision making approaches outranking and preference elicitation.