Rolling Horizon Scheduling of Multi-factory Supply Chains

The Virtual Factory is a job shop scheduling tool that was developed at NC State. It has been found to provide nearoptimal solutions to industrial-sized problems in seconds. Recently, the Virtual Factory was expanded to include interfactory transportation operations which enabled the detailed scheduling of entire multi-factory manufacturing supply chains. Separately, a rolling horizon procedure was developed to test the Virtual Factory for single factory problems. This procedure allowed us to more accurately predict how the Virtual Factory would perform in industry. Consequently, the rolling horizon procedure was extended to multi-factory settings to gauge industrial performance and eliminate transient effects found in previous multi-factory experimentation. Experimental results, under a variety of different scenarios, indicate that the Virtual Factory also performs well in multi-factory, rolling horizon settings.