Reactive and energy-aware scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems using potential fields

This paper presents a reactive scheduling approach for flexible manufacturing systems, which integrates the overall energy consumption of the production. This work is justified by the growing needs of manufacturers for energy-aware control, due to new important environmental criteria, which holds true in the context of high reactivity. It makes production hard to predict. The proposed reactive scheduling model is based on potential fields. In this model, resources that sense the intentions from products are able to switch to standby mode to avoid useless energy consumption and emit fields to attract products. Simulations are provided, featuring three indicators: makespan, overall energy consumption and the number of resource switches. Real experiments were carried out to illustrate the feasibility of the approach on a real system and validate the simulation results. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.