Remote scheduling of production activities: tools, paradigms and performance

Remote scheduling is a fast growing area of research in the wider area of Production Planning and Control (PP&C). Many solutions have been reported in the literature and many scheduling tools are currently available, however, the criteria for their evaluation and comparison remain loosely defined. This paper proposes an overview of existing solutions, highlighting their advantages and limitations, to support academics and industrial users in their choices of scheduling techniques and Inter Process Communication (IPC) solutions for the remote and online scheduling of production. This paper also proposes design guidelines and performance measures against which production managers can evaluate and improve their solutions.