Exploring the benefits of scheduling with advanced and real-time information integration in Industry 4.0: A computational study

The technological advances recently brought to the manufacturing arena (collectively known as Industry 4.0) offer huge possibilities to improve decision-making processes in the shop floor by enabling the integration of information in real-time. Among these processes, scheduling is often cited as one of the main beneficiaries, given its data-intensive and dynamic nature. However, in view of the extremely high implementation costs of Industry 4.0, these potential benefits should be properly assessed, also taking into account that there are different approaches and solution procedures that can be employed in the scheduling decision-making process, as well as several information sources (i.e. not only shop floor status data, but also data from upstream/downstream processes). In this paper, we model various decision-making scenarios in a shop floor with different degrees of uncertainty and diverse efficiency measures, and carry out a computational experience to assess how real-time and advance information can be advantageously integrated in the Industry 4.0 context. The extensive computational experiments (equivalent to 6.3 years of CPU time) show that the benefits of using real-time, integrated shop floor data and advance information heavily depend on the proper choice of both the scheduling approach and the solution procedures, and that there are scenarios where this usage is even counterproductive. The results of the paper provide some starting points for future research regarding the design of approaches and solution procedures that allow fully exploiting the technological advances of Industry 4.0 for decision-making in scheduling.