Flexible Manufacturing in the Ceramic Tile Industry

The ceramic tile industry has evolved greatly in the recent years to the almost complete automation of the production line. After a decade of improvements in the manufacture, today’s plants are capable of mass produce tiles with little human intervention. However, the planning and scheduling of the orders has not changed much and scheduling the client’s orders in the shop remains as a manually solved problem. This problem is now even worse as orders become smaller, due dates have shortened and more and more different products are to be offered to the client to remain competitive. Traditional scheduling methods are not easily applicable for the new market situation. In this work we evaluate the capabilities of the professional software to obtain feasible schedules in a reasonable amount of time by using already implemented heuristics such as the genetic algorithms.