Distributed Scheduling in Cellular Assembly for Mass Customization

Industry 4.0 has many objectives; among them is increasing flexibility in manufacturing, as well as offering mass customization, better quality, and improved productivity. It thus enables companies to cope with the challenges of producing increasingly individualized products with a short lead-time to market and higher quality. In Mass Customization, manufacturers are challenged to produce customized products at the lowest possible cost with minimal lead-time. This increased customization increases complexity in production planning. The main challenge becomes planning production for lots of one and for high product variety and volatile market demand. Moreover, the customer requires real time update on his order status, and is less tolerant for delays. Nevertheless, in a make to order or assembly to order supply chain, many disturbances (supplier delay, machine brake-downs, transportation network disturbance, …) may highly increase the customer order delay. Hence, production planning in this context becomes more complex requiring real-time information exchange with all stages of the supply chain. This paper tries to answer this challenge by proposing a distributed production scheduling approach for mass customization in a cellular assembly layout.