Reactive scheduling system for cellular manufacturing with failure-prone machines

A new approach is described for solving the scheduling problem when machine failure is involved and the environment is customer oriented. The cellular manufacturing system considered is comprised of non-redundant conventional machines whose capabilities may overlap in terms of operation performance. The model developed considers the contribution of each machine in the system to determine re-schedulability when a machine fails. One of the major criteria for rescheduling is the maximum allowable idle time (MTm) of a given machine, which is based on the maximum capacity of the most heavily loaded machine among all the machines used to produce a product. Testing of the model over a range of scheduling horizons and with different scheduling rules showed that this approach can provide effective dynamic rescheduling under machine failure conditions.