Alternative approaches analysis for scheduling in an Extended Manufacturing Environment

Abstract

Extended Manufacturing Environments (EMEs) are nowadays growing due to the increase on Distributed and Virtual Enterprises, which led to an emergent need to apply scheduling approaches accordingly. This can be achieved in several different ways, namely by putting forward new approaches or by trying to adapt existing ones. In this paper the adaptation of some existing scheduling methods is proposed for solving a two stage manufacturing scheduling problem, and an illustrative example is presented. Several approaches were analyses, namely through the use of the ANOVA and the Post Hoc Scheffe's test, that demonstrated the superior performance of one of the proposed methods.