Abstract: Due to various complicated factors in mould manufacturing system, it is especially difficult to control the mould heat-treatment production. To deal with this problem, a workload-control-based production planning and control approach is proposed. A three-level model of workload control for mould shop floor is presented. For heat-treatment shop floor, the key problems for its workload control are analyzed. Moreover, the workload dynamic balancing is taken into consideration, the rules on determining when and where the heat-treatment jobs must go are also proposed. Both the delivery performance and machine utilization rate are used for developing the scheduling optimization model. A periodic and event-driven rolling horizon algorithm is developed via the discrete event simulation and the compromise programming. And the analysis of algorithmic time complexity is then presented. The production planning system of heat-treatment shop floor is developed on the basis of the algorithm, thereby obtaining multi scheduling results, where each result corresponds to a team of weights. Based on these results, the effects of different weights on the algorithm are analyzed. At the same time, the performances of the proposed algorithm and other similar algorithms are compared, which shows that the proposed algorithm is more practical and effective.

Key words: Batch scheduling, Discrete event simulation, Heat-treatment, Mould, Rolling scheduling, Workload control