Enhanced branch and bound approach for receding horizon based planning

In this work, we present an efficient planning algorithm for flexible manufacturing industries. In particular, we modified a traditional branch and bound approach to be used in a receding horizon manner by adopting the terminal cost concept from model predictive control domain. Thus, the proposed algorithm combines best practices from traditional planning and scheduling as well as from process control. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated on job shop problems of different sizes. Results are compared with traditional branch and bound based planning. The initial results are encouraging and demonstrate superior performance as well as scalability for large problems.