Smart Make-to-Order Production in a Flow Shop Environment for Industry 4.0

The permutation flow shop scheduling problem is one of the popular problems in operations research due to its complexity and also its practical applications in industries. With the fourth generation industrial revolution, decisional aspects in make to order flow shop environment needs to be decentralized and autonomous. One of the aspects is to consider a real-time or dynamic production environment where customers place orders into the system dynamically and the decision maker has to decide whether the order can be accepted considering the available production capacity and how to schedule the jobs of an accepted order. To answer these research questions, in this chapter, the authors introduce a new decision-making, real-time strategy intended to yield flexible and efficient flow shop production schedules with and without setup conditions, Numerical experiments based on realistic problem scenarios show the superiority of the proposed real-time approach over traditional right shifting approaches.