The next KE Hub online Triage Workshop will be presented by Johnson Matthey:
Optimisation of scheduling in an autocatalyst manufacturing plant
Scheduling the sequence and duration of catalyst manufacture in our Clean Air plants involves balancing many variables. Availability of raw material, the status and progress of up-stream processes, customer deadlines and many others. Because automotive catalysts are typically individually optimised for each OEM engine, one production line might make tens or hundreds of different products and this adds to the complexity of scheduling. In addition, estimates of the manufacturing time for a catalyst batch are typically based on previous data and consideration of any planned changes to equipment or manpower availability relies on manual intervention.
We would like to explore new approaches to both predicting the manufacturing time and determining the optimal sequence of product batches. This should allow us to take additional factors into consideration, such as scheduling products with similar properties together to reduce the time needed to change between batches. We would also like to be able to use previous plant data to predict the manufacturing efficiency impact of different scheduling strategies.
