| dc.description.abstract | This study develops a scheduling system for an automation production line. The objective is to provide real-time scheduling when an abnormality occurs in a workstation and to design an integration approach for the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) as the main console of the workstation. In this study, we first design the architecture of the automated production line scheduling system, including order module, scheduling module, dispatch module, workstation module, exception monitoring module, and report module. Then, the connection methods between them are designed, including data, format and exchange methods. According to the actual problems of the automation production line, the core of the scheduling module is developed. The dispatch module is designed to make the PLC to focus on the scheduling task. The workstation module will not only execute the PLC program but also record and report the actual process data, machine status and anomaly. When the workstation console detects the anomaly and sends a notification, it triggers the rescheduling mechanism of the scheduling system. At this time, the anomaly module compares the existing and scheduled data and provides the scheduling module with the unresolved tasks to generate new results.
For verification, this study applies Google OR-Tools as the core of scheduling and uses SQL data table as the communication interfaces among modules to integrate the actual workstations with the scheduling system. The validation test includes the scheduling of normal conditions, full-line downtime, and single workstation failure scenarios. From the comparison between the actual and the expected results, it can be found that there are some small errors in this experiment due to the difference in the actual working hours settings.
In overall, the validation results proved the design concept of the system, including the realization of immediate rescheduling after a workstation occurred abnormality and the reduction of the integration workload of PLC and scheduling system. | en_US |