A Perspective of the Manufacturing Future: Production Scheduling - DZone IoT

In my last post on the future of cutting tools, I discussed a vision and roadmap document that I created and refined over the years. This roadmap was created by imagining what perfection (or utopia) looked like utilizing what we know to be technically possible today. It was a glimpse into a futuristic system for handling cutting tools in machining operations including robotic automation, copious amounts of data, and artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning. Today, I'm going to describe a vision for a futuristic production management system where data silos do not exist, predictive analytics provide glimpses into the future, and algorithms optimize throughput to balance costs and demand. Frequently, production decisions are made with partial information and what may seem like the "optimal" solution on a local-level creates costly disturbances on the macro-level.