The PDES Workbench

  • Authors:

  • Roman van der Krogt;James Little

  • Affiliations:

  • Cork Constraint Computation Centre, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland;Cork Constraint Computation Centre, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Leading the Web in Concurrent Engineering: Next Generation Concurrent Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Central to the operation of a manufacturing plant is the planning and scheduling of the activities that take place. The quality of the plans and schedules produced has significant impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of a company. These schedules are restricted by the constraints imposed upon them by the design of the plant. However, while expert designers are able to roughly predict the outcome of a design in terms of its overall throughput, quantitative figures on future schedules are not usually produced. By implication, design constraints may be found to be expensive in scheduling terms during the operation of the plant and at a stage when improvements are hard or expensive to make. This paper presents the PDES Workbench, a graphical system that is able to generate plans and schedules based on real-life manufacturing plant designs. This allows a manager or planner to assess the schedulability of a particular design at an early stage. When a schedule is found to be flawed in any aspect, it may not be apparent what to change in the design without degrading other aspects of the schedule. Therefore, the system is equipped with a case-based reasoning system that is able to proactively suggest ways of improving the design for improved scheduling results.