A Shop Floor Production Scheduling Case based on RFID-supported Smart Factory

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely implemented for real-time data collection in manufacturing shop floors, which, in turn, can be used to support dynamic shop floor production planning and scheduling. Within such an environment, uncertainty in operation and production processes collectively contribute to the dynamicity in manufacturing, thereby hampering the scheduling system from achieving maximal utility. To highlight the importance of handling such uncertainty, this paper addresses the problem of dynamic shop floor scheduling for a real-life case smart factory equipped with RFID technology. Feasible production sequence mining and real-time processing rate estimation are conducted on RFID-collected production data to quantify the operation and production uncertainties. A deep reinforcement learning approach based on the RFID data analysis is then presented for shop floor production scheduling. Simulation studies based on real-life case data have demonstrated the feasibility and practicality of the proposed dynamic production scheduling framework. Specifically, it is observed that the proposed framework outperforms existing dispatch methods in terms of minimizing operation makespan, including first in first out (FIFO), last in first out (LIFO) and deep Q network (DQN).

Reinforcement Learning-Based Production Scheduling in an Industry-Based Coating Scenario Using the Digital Model Playground

Production scheduling in complex manufacturing environments is challenging when sequence-dependent setup times, stochastic disturbances, and due-date constraints must be addressed simultaneously. While reinforcement learning (RL) methods have shown promising results in research, most studies rely on simplified benchmark processes, limiting their industrial relevance. This paper demonstrates the applicability of RL-based scheduling in an industry-inspired coating process that reflects practical complexities such as sequence-dependent setup times, machine breakdowns, and variable utilization. The open-source Digital Model Playground (DMPG), a discrete event simulation framework, is used to model the scenario and to train RL agents. Two standard algorithms, Deep Q-Networks and Proximal Policy Optimization, are benchmarked against conventional dispatching rules to illustrate feasibility and to provide a transparent testbed for further research. Results indicate that RL-based scheduling achieves balanced improvements across key performance indicators, with PPO delivering the most robust performance. The main contribution of this work is to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial practice by validating RL-based scheduling in a realistic, shareable scenario and by providing a reusable open-source framework for future studies.