A XML-Based Shop Floor Adaptive Scheduler Design

Due to the complex, uncertainty and dynamic in the modern manufacturing environment, a flexible and robust shop floor scheduler is essential to achieve the system production goals. The paper proposes a design framework of shop floor scheduler. The details of its function modules were discussed. An adaptive scheduling strategy and a XML-based process plan representation were utilized in the scheduler, which acquires the dispatching rule from the knowledge base and uses the build-in on-line simulator to evaluate the rule. These technologies enable the scheduler has a good fine-tune ability and transfers effectively process information to other heterogeneous information systems in a shop floor. The framework introduced in the paper has been demonstrated with a manufacturing case.