On the Verification of Distributed Control for Multi Job Shop Assignment Problem in Smart Manufacturing System

The increasing need of product individualization and rapid demand fluctuation leads industrial manufacturers to leveraging new control solutions for production planning and control. Among these, distributed control approaches for the multi job shop scheduling problem could be a promising solution to make smart manufacturing systems more responsive to the market. In this context, this paper aims at investigating the effectiveness and the benefits of distributed control approaches for solving the multi job shop assignment problem on a real-world smart manufacturing process involving the production of high-vacuum solar panels. The validation is carried out by leveraging Cyber-Physical Systems modelling and a digital model-based procedure which, interacting with the physical plant, provides the proper job assignment in order to optimize the overall makespan and work-in-progress in a fully-distributed fashion.