Support system for process flow scheduling

Abstract

Process flow scheduling is a concept that refers to the scheduling of flow shop process plants, whose scheduling calculations are guided by the process structure. In a wide variety of high-volume process industries, the process flow scheduling concept implies an integrated structure for planning and scheduling. This integrated vision of the planning function and the very particular characteristics of the process industry production environment challenge the application of the most traditional approaches to support planning/scheduling activities. We are working with the aim of developing a conceptual system foundation to support process flow scheduling. We started from a grass roots study of the current process flow planning/scheduling practices and we applied an object oriented analysis and design methodology to design a system to support process flow scheduling. Essentially, the system supports a process flow scheduling model that can be used to instantiate production resources of a particular industry, the plant structure and the products with their respective production processes. In this way, the particular scheduling problem of a production order set will be instantiated. In this work we describe the process flow scheduling problem, a process flow scheduling support system architecture, a general ontology of the process flow scheduling, an object oriented design of the system and some implementation details.