Sequence Dependent Change Over Times and Costs

Crucial feature it the time or cost to change from one operation to the next depends on the types of operations or the tooling required. For example, the time required to clean a chocolate processing machine can be a lot lower when changing from a white chocolate product to a dark chocolate product as opposed to moving from dark to white. And this can even be exacerbated when moving from allergen to non-allergen products.

The optimization engine aims to group operations together such that minimal changeover times are achieved. However, as a sequence minimizing changeover times on one machine is not necessarily the sequence that minimizes changeover times on another machine, the optimizer always keeps the main objective in focus.

Multiple Objectives

Planners and schedulers get more freedom to choose (and to think about) what to optimize for. Besides late orders, one can minimize numbers of days late, or idle time, define custom functions minimizing cost or maximizing operating profit.

Multiple objectives can be hierarchically ordered, e.g. first minimize late orders and if alternate schedules can be found with the same number of orders late, minimize cost.

Tooling

Requested by many clients, we can now accommodate the case where multiple resources share the same tooling and avoid scheduling operations at the same time requiring a specific set of tooling.
We also allow the feature where a tooling resource is not only shared across resources of the same type, but also over different types and work centers. This can come in handy when specialized limited available racks or containers are required to follow an item or a batch throughout multiple processing steps.