Decentralized Scheduling and Dispatch Control for the Traditional Labor-Intensive Assembly System

The fourth industrial revolution has broadly transformed the manufacturing system. However, this transformation is somewhat lacking in traditional or manual production systems due to the absence of IT infrastructure. Such traditional industries need to have the advantage of real-time control and monitoring. This study has developed economic assembly planning, scheduling, and control for a traditional assembly system. We used the concept of the configurable virtual workstation as the digitalization framework. Then, we employed the decentralized scheduling concept to reduce the computational effort in scheduling the complex product. The implementation result showed that scheduling and planning have transformed the traditional assembly process into intelligent scheduling and control with low digitalization effort.