Architecture of manufacturing scheduling systems: Literature review and an integrated proposal

This paper deals with the development of customised and realistic manufacturing scheduling systems. More specifically, we focus onto a key element that may help driving their efficient design and implementation: i.e., the set of building blocks that should include a generic scheduling system and its interconnections, a set collectively known as the architecture of a system. To do so, we first analyse existing contributions on the topic together with papers describing different functional requirements of scheduling systems. These contributions are then discussed and classified, and a modular architecture for manufacturing scheduling systems is proposed. This proposal updates, extends and refines the well-known architecture proposed earlier by Pinedo and Yen's [Pinedo, M.L., Yen, B.P.-C., 1997. On the design and development of object-oriented scheduling systems. Annals of Operations Research 70 (1), 359-378], and serves to integrate the different requirements identified in the literature review.