Semiconductor, power equipment, and electronics equipment manufacturers soon may get access to advanced shop floor scheduling and sequencing optimization software that has been proven in complex, high-volume automotive manufacturing environments.
Top officials at scheduling optimization software provider Optessa Inc. say they are planning versions of their product tailored to those industries. The company will begin with a pilot test of the Optessa Multi-Line Scheduling (MLS) product in a semiconductor manufacturing plant later this year.
"MLS has been used very effectively in large automotive manufacturing environments where complexity is high, where investment in production equipment is high, and where volumes are high," says Srinivas Netrakanti, Optessa's CEO. "We believe many of the same characteristics are present in the other manufacturing verticals that we are targeting."
Optessa's plan to expand beyond the automotive manufacturing environment is significant because the company's MLS tool represents a breakthrough of sorts in plant scheduling software. The MLS tool is based on what is known as combinatorial heuristics algorithms, which let systems effectively analyze problems that involve many constraints.
Combinatorial heuristics, however, typically requires massive computing power. For that reason, early tools based on the technique often were unable to account for as many constraints as existed in a complex production line scheduling environment, says Netrakanti, who co-founded an earlier scheduling tool company, TigrSoft.
Five-year-old Optessa has overcome those limitations by optimizing combinatorial heuristics algorithms to take advantage of new generations of more powerful personal computers, Netrakanti says. The MLS tool can create optimized schedules in automotive plants where there are as many as 100 constraints and where production is as high as 20,000 units per month, Netrakanti says.
Such high-powered scheduling is increasingly important in automotive plants where manufacturers are facing increasing complexity.
Auto manufacturers increasingly are leaning out production environments, driving down inventories. That increases scheduling constraints, Netrakanti notes. At the same time, customers and dealers are demanding that manufacturers build more vehicles to order and commit to quick delivery schedules, increasing complexity even more.
So far, three large automotive manufacturers — one in Japan and two of the Big Three in North America — have signed on with Optessa.
Now Optessa is betting that other industries, such as semiconductor manufacturing, would benefit from the same type of advanced scheduling optimization software that carmakers are beginning to use.
This article originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Managing Automation.