Capability-based planning and scheduling for adaptable manufacturing systems

Manufacturing enterprises can only stay profitable if they manage to flexibly respond to changes in markets by adapting their products, product variants, and product volumes. To support such variety in products, we suggest a capability-based approach for production planning and scheduling. Production plans and machines are described in terms of required capabilities and provided capabilities respectively. Additionally, the topology of the factory is described. We propose to combine these descriptions to automatically generate production schedules that consider the material flow in the factory. For each production plan, our approach generates a valid schedule for the currently available machines in the factory without manually reconfiguring the software. The evaluation of the approach on an industrial production system used for educational purposes shows the suitability of this approach.