Intelligent Scheduling and Shop Floor Control in Industrial Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Scheduling appears in almost all segments of modern industry, whether that be logistics, project planning, autonomous manufacturing, etc. These related challenges often have characteristics specific to their field, but in general, they involve the allocation of resources to tasks over time, satisfying both temporal and capacity constraints. The objective of scheduling is usually to either check the feasibility of a given solution (simulation), to find a feasible schedule (satisfiability) or to determine the best schedule for one or more objectives (optimization). While developments in the field often have strong practical motivations, scheduling literature covers everything from formally proven theoretical theorems to experimental case studies of specific applications. This remains true for the scope of this journal, i.e., industrial manufacturing in combination with automated / semi-automated machinery.

This Special Issue will accept contributions of theoretical or empirical results regarding scheduling challenges in the fields of machinery and engineering. The topics of emphasized focus are:

• Intelligent scheduling: The field of finding the optimal schedule was dominated by operations research for a long time, but the NP-hard nature of such scheduling problems, the uncertainty of events, the necessity of real-time scheduling, and the rapidly developing technology changed this situation. Newer requirements and expectations can be satisfied by intelligent solutions. These approaches can solve scheduling problems faster than traditional methods, providing good but not necessarily optimal solutions.
• Shop floor control: The Industry 4.0 concept supposes that smart, autonomous machines can make decisions based on sensor data to optimize their operations. Moreover, they can communicate with each other, i.e., they form a distributive system. To control the shop floor, there is a need for intelligent algorithms which can communicate with each other in a manner that is adapted to the hierarchy of the shop floor.

Researchers in these fields are invited to contribute their original, unpublished works. Both research and review papers are welcome.

Dr. Tibor Holczinger
Dr. Máté Hegyháti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• scheduling
• metaheuristic algorithms
• artificial intelligence
• stochastic optimization
• fuzzy logic
• manufacturing systems
• industry 4.0
• automation and control systems
• optimal operation