Adaptive Scheduling in the Era of Cloud Manufacturing

Industry 4.0 enables the transition of traditional manufacturing models to the digitalized paradigm, creating significant economic opportunities through market reshaping. Scheduling is a key field of manufacturing systems. Academia and industry are closely collaborating for producing enhanced solutions, taking advantage of multiple criteria. Initially, the scheduling problem was dealt with more simplistic methods resulting in static solutions; however, with the evolution of digital technologies, scheduling became more dynamic to the company’s environmental changes. As Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) became mainstream and systems were integrated, rescheduling and adaptive scheduling became the cornerstones of Smart Manufacturing. These technologies have been further advanced to yield more reliable results in a shorter period of time. The efficient design, planning, and operation of manufacturing systems and networks can be achieved with the adoption of cyber physical systems (CPS) in conjunction with the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. The transition to Smart Manufacturing is achieved with the adoption of cutting-edge digital technologies and the integration state-of-the-art manufacturing assets. Consequently, this chapter presents an opportunity for tracking the evolution of scheduling techniques during the last decade, as well as for extracting insightful and meaningful inferences from the application of innovative solutions in industrial use cases.