Parallel scheduling for evolving manufacturing systems

New approaches in the design of manufacturing systems, such as adaptive and service-oriented manufacturing systems or self-optimizing resources introduce new degrees of freedom into manufacturing control. Fast adaptation to quickly changing market requirements and new objectives summarized by the term sustainability are the main drivers of these new concepts. The resulting research question is how human decision makers can exploit the high adaptability of these new manufacturing systems in accordance to the current requirements arising from the market. This contribution reviews a scheduling model suitable to meet the requirements of the new class of manufacturing systems, called evolving manufacturing systems. To solve scheduling problems defined by this model a multiobjective evolutionary approach is suggested and a suitable problem encoding and corresponding evolutionary operators are introduced. To consider the operative character of scheduling, a practicable parallelization strategy suitable for modern CPU designs is introduced.