Interoperability as a Supporting Principle of Industry 4.0 for Smart Manufacturing Scheduling: A Research Note

The job shop is a production environment that is frequently analyzed and modeled as an isolated cell with little or no interaction with other areas of the production system or the supply chain of which it forms part. For decades, the abstraction on which this endogenous approach is based has provided a profound understanding of the job-shop scheduling problem and the static aspects characterizing it. Nowadays, it is worth highlighting the dynamic and interconnected nature of the contemporary job shop, a space where the design principles and enabling technologies of Industry 4.0 acquire a significant role. This paradigm provides the job shop with new opportunities to improve competitiveness through its digital transformation, but also poses a challenge with risks and barriers. From this interconnected digital job-shop perspective, the efficiency of its operations, including that of the job scheduling process, is critically conditioned by the interoperability between its own production resources and those of the entities in its intra- and supracompany environment that make up the value chain. This article studies the support that interoperability can specifically provide in the job-shop scheduling itinerary toward higher levels of automation, autonomy, and capacity for real-time action. This transformation process is known in the literature as smart manufacturing scheduling.