Adaptive Setup Planning for Job Shop Operations under Uncertainty

This chapter presents a novel decision-making approach toward adaptive setup planning that considers both the availability and capability of machines on a shop floor. It loosely integrates scheduling functions at the setup planning stage, and utilises a two-step decision-making strategy for generating machine-neutral and machine-specific setup plans at each stage. The objective of this research is to enable adaptive setup planning for dynamic job shop machining operations through collaborations among multiple system modules residing in different resources and interactions with human operators. Particularly, this chapter covers basic concepts and algorithms for one-time generic setup planning, and run-time final setup merging for specific machines. The decision-making process and algorithms validation are further demonstrated through a case study. It is expected that the proposed approach can largely enhance the dynamism of fluctuating job shop operations.