P&G is revolutionizing its manufacturing operations, driving progress towards becoming a Factory of the Future in the highly competitive and rapidly changing FMCG industry. Factory of the Future is characterized by touchless and automated operation using smart machines and seamless digitized information across the supply chain. In this collaborative project between A*STAR I2R and P&G, we developed smart control strategies addressing the following challenges:
- Production sequencing
Given a production demand from SAP, determine the optimal production sequence of different SKUs to achieve the best performance (e.g. minimizing the changeover time, minimizing the production makespan), taking into consideration the constraints from the production floor (e.g. available production lines and their capability, available resources, etc.)
- Resource allocation
Given a production schedule and the capabilities of the resources, determine the best task allocation to ensure the optimal resource utilization and efficiency (e.g. minimizing the traveling distance, minimizing the total number of resources used) while meeting all the production demand within a specified time frame.
- Routing and scheduling
Given a set of samples and their respective test laboratory, determine the optimal route for the robot to transport all the samples to the desired destination using minimum number of robots and/or transportation time, taking into consideration the size of the samples and the carrying capacity of the robot.
In this collaboration, A*STAR I2R has developed several mathematical models which are flexible to handle different factory settings and different objective functions, and provide visualization to give insights on the factory operation.