Distributed scheduling in industry 4.

Industry 4.0 is largely accepted to be the next Industrial Revolution. It exploits the
application of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Computer Optimization, and Industrial IoT
Techniques in manufacturing enterprises to create a system capable of remote monitoring,
intelligent planning, and optimal decision making with proactive feedback support. At its
most fundamental level, it enables ‘non-human entities to autonomously interact with each
other and with humans, to intelligently work towards their goals, and make data-centric
decisions using cyber-physical transformations and Internet of Things.’ In the coming future,
intelligence is to be embedded in every entity of the industry, which can be seen as an
opportunity to replace the conventional way of working in the industry with a smart method,
where every machine can make decisions. Thus, a decentralized algorithm to perform
scheduling of jobs in a manufacturing industry is tried to develop for a flow shop
environment. The algorithm is called the Social Scheduling Algorithm and forms the primary
novelty of the work. The problem is described in an Industry 4.0 factory setting where every
machine is converted to its cyber twin and is capable of making its own decision. The
optimization problem is to minimize the makespan.

The work done so far shows that the social scheduling algorithm can solve the large size
problem with good results in significantly very less runtime compare to other algorithms. The
benefits of using a social scheduling approach can be further enhanced by considering the
actual working load and the health of the machines. Every machine is converted to its cyber
twin, this can be used while scheduling the jobs to avoid unnecessary delays due to some
unavoidable reasons like the failure of machines or unavailability of the workers, etc. It can
also be combined with a maintenance schedule of the machines to save time due to machine
failures.