Manufacturing scheduling is acknowledged as a source of competitive advantages in the operation of manufacturing companies. For most factories, the volume of data and constraints makes these decision problems unsuitable to be efficiently handled by humans, up to the point that there are serious concerns that human expert schedulers do exist in manufacturing.
Aside, most scheduling deals with relatively structured and reliable data and with usually well-defined decision problems, so on paper not many areas look as promising in order to exploit the advances of Operational Research, Production Management, and Information Systems in order to assist humans in complex decision-making.
Yet, many researchers in the field find difficult to avoid the impression that the wealth of theoretical results obtained up to now are seldom applied outside their labs and that, at the same time, existing systems and methods do not sufficiently support scheduling practice. Several promising research streams with high-impact practical application will be pointed out. The aim of the talk is to foster research in these areas with an eye on their translation into shop floor practices. He works on decision systems and models in industry and services, including a range of decisions related to the design and optimization of processes, production and supply chain planning and scheduling, as well as information systems as a supporting infrastructure.
In these areas, he has published extensively in international journals, and has recently co-authored a book on Manufacturing Scheduling Systems. He serves as editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Industrial Engineering. Human beings have experienced two major industrial revolutions. The first one took place in the 19th century, which replaced muscle power from humans and animals with mechanical power.
The second one started in the middle 20th century, which provided people and societies with Internet. It was built with the technologies from computing, communication, networking and information storage. Both offered unprecedented productivity increases. What will be the next one? This talk intends to answer this question by presenting some recent development of Internet of Things IoT.
