Digital twin-driven dynamic scheduling for the assembly workshop of complex products with workers allocation

Abstract

Assembly processes for complex products primarily involve manual assembly and often encounter various disruptive events, such as the insertion of new orders, order cancellations, task adjustments, workers absences, and job rotations. The dynamic scheduling problem for complex product assembly workshops requires consideration of trigger events and time nodes for rescheduling, as well as the allocations of multi-skilled and multi-level workers. The application of digital twin technology in smart manufacturing enables managers to more effectively monitor and control disruptive events and production factors on the production site. Therefore, a dynamic scheduling strategy based on digital twin technology is proposed to enable real-time monitoring of dynamic events in the assembly workshop, triggering rescheduling when necessary, adjusting task processing sequences and team composition accordingly, and establishing a corresponding dynamic scheduling integer programming model. Additionally, based on NSGA-II, an improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (IMOEA) is proposed, which utilizes the maximum completion time as the production efficiency indicator and the time deviation before and after rescheduling as the production stability indicator. Three new population initialization rules are designed, and the optimal parameter combination for these rules is determined. Finally, the effectiveness of the scheduling strategy is verified through the construction of a workshop digital twin system.