Rescheduling flowshops under simultaneous disruptions

Production planning and scheduling systems are pervasive in manufacturing systems to increase productivity, variety and customization without incurring in high costs. A large number of impromptu disruptions frequently affect the scheduled operations and invalidate the original schedules. Rescheduling actions have to be triggered in order to reduce the impact on the performance of the system. A large body of research covering miscellaneous problem characteristics can be found in the scheduling literature. Even so, the application of scheduling techniques is still infrequent in real-life scheduling problems. In this work we generate eight types of disruptions that affect the original schedules simultaneously. We apply three rescheduling methods and compare their results with simple rule based repair actions typically employed in production environments. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the rule based approaches by a significant margin, highlighting their effectiveness in real life manufacturing settings.