Manninagarajan, Padmanabhan ; Jeffrey A. Joines, Committee Member,Thom J. Hodgson, Committee Member,Kristin A. Thoney, Committee Chair,Manninagarajan, Padmanabhan ; Jeffrey A. Joines ; Committee Member ; Thom J. Hodgson ; Committee Member ; Kristin A. Thoney ; Committee Chair
Scheduling is critical in all industries as it helps to reduce delays in job completion by effectively using all available resources. The Virtual Factory is one of the many job shop-scheduling systems for scheduling large problems. The Virtual Factory is an iterative simulation based procedure that has been found to provide near-optimal solutions to industrial-sized problems. As the current version of the Virtual Factory has more than 40 classes, understanding it might be a time-consuming task even for an experienced C++ programmer. To make it easier for the user to perform experiments, a Visual Basic interface is developed.The Virtual Factory has primarily been tested under transient conditions in which the plant is run until it is empty. In industry, each day jobs are released, the status of the plant is downloaded, and scheduling is performed. The best schedule is implemented until the plant is scheduled again. To analyze the potential performance of the Virtual Factory in industry, it is tested in a rolling horizon setting. Experiments with various parameters show that the Virtual Factory also performs well in these circumstances.