Specialized Scheduling Modules
No matter how sophisticated a scheduling system is, generating high quality schedules for real world plants in the processing industry is a tall order. Many processes have specialized constraints, e.g. minimum or maximum hold times, or process specific rules for equipment selection based on the properties of individual products. A system that has not been designed with the peculiarities of the target process will often have no chance of delivering schedules that are truly usable on the shop floor. Yet, designing specialized algorithms for every process is prohibitively expensive from both software development and maintenance standpoints.
One of the unique aspects of VirtECS® Scheduler is its modular design that permits easy implementation of customized logic required to satisfy the exacting details of a particular process. When we encounter projects that involve process-specific details, VirtECS® permits the logic to be contained in a custom module that can be easily re-used. These modules are efficient to develop because the modular nature of our system allows us to build them by specializing only a tiny fraction of the code base, typically less than 1%. Moreover, applying VirtECS® to processes that fit into these specialized categories is particularly quick and easy because much of the custom logic required to achieve process-specific behavior is already perfected.
Examples of existing VirtECS® modules include: