Abstract

Decision making is an important function of any industry, from planning phase till the
product is shipped there are many important decision which are taken. A good decision is
the one which is based on concepts and algorithms. With the onset of industry 4.0 the world
is going towards AI and automation, which plays a key role in decision making. The world is
moving in an era where most of the decisions are taken by the industrial assets without any
human interference, this is achieved by the help of cyber-twin and cyber-physical systems.
In this project the work is done towards making a CPS more useful in decision making the
main focus was on sequencing of the jobs.

Industry 4.0 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 the intelligence is to be embedded in every entity of industry,
keeping that thing in mind Agent based job scheduling algorithm is design for job scheduling
in flow shop environment. This algorithm is first of a kind which enables scheduling in a
distributed manner, where every machine is included in the decision making for the final
schedule.

Due to decentralise nature of algorithm, there are many advantages it have, which are
discussed later in this report. More specifically, advantage of using communication
algorithm over conventional methods, such as Johnson’s rule, in minimizing the makespan
for a production horizon and genetic algorithm is shown. It further demonstrates how the
impact increases as: i) number of jobs to be scheduled increase, ii) number of machines
increase and iii) the variability in the job-processing times increases.

After developing algorithm for most common flow shop, the work is extended to real
industry sequencing problem