Dr. Oliver Rose, Simulation Chair in the School of Applied Computation at the Technical University of Dresden, visited the Keck Virtual Factory Lab June 23-25, 2008.

Dr. Rose spent several days learning about the Keck Lab research into "on-demand scheduling." Dr. Rose's assessment was that "the Keck Lab work using SysML to drive on-demand simulation is very promising, and we hope to develop a close collaboration."

Dr. Rose also presented an invited seminar on "Simulation-based Scheduling* based on his work over the last two years and the lessons he has learned from developing workforce scheduling solutions for complex assembly lines. His research focuses on making optimum use of the available workers while maximizing the number of jobs processed during a given time horizon. The workers have a large range of qualifications, the jobs have due dates, and there are several resource modes for most of the productions steps (for instance, short processing times with large number of workers or smaller processing time with fewer workers). Typical manufacturing environments where these conditions can be found are the assembly of planes, turbines, printing machines, or other large one-of-a-kind assembly outputs. Due to the huge number of constraints on scheduling in these environments, it is hard even to find a feasible schedule for the workers. This was the main reason why he decided to start the development of a simulation-based scheduler. He is more than half way through this development process and there are several important "lessons learned" with respect to the solution approach as such and the data and information requirements he requires from his partners in industry. In this talk, he discussed modeling issues (e.g., is it possible to develop a common model description for a variety of industries?), solution approach issues (e.g., is it possible to find a feasible solution on time?), and data/information collection issues (e.g., which tools do we need to obtain relevant data/information from our partners in industry).