Abstract
Manufacturing disruptions can be a major driving factor in the wastage of resources and delays which result in spiralling costs and cancelled orders. Operational decision making should therefore consider the potential for disruptions from as many sources as possible, encouraging improvements to operational resilience and agility. Our work presents a scheduling and rescheduling framework formulated as a rolling horizon problem for the emulation of real time decision making within a dynamically changing scenario. The framework is applied to a complex multistage problem with parallel lines susceptible to disruptions as a result of process or equipment failures, or ineffective inventory management that results in material shortages. The framework is demonstrated for a simple example case which highlights the impact of disruptions on the time taken to complete orders and the associated costs. It is observed that the inclusion of disruptions can alter equipment congestion, shifting focus for future process improvements. A scenario with intermittent raw material availability is explored, with greater mean and range for a large number of simulations performed, compared to the case with constant availability. A compounding effect is observed, whereby disruptions lead to a greater likelihood of further disruptions as machine runtimes increase and tasks are repeated. The presented framework presents a strong basis from which future works could be performed in a range of scenarios and with different operating policies.