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Abstract

Manufacturing have been constantly challenged to increase process productivity while maintaining quality, safety and production risks at a reasonable level. Engineered wood products is one of the most thriving and dynamic manufacturing sectors in British Columbia, which is also confronted with declining productivity levels. Cross-laminated timber (CLT), an engineered wood product used in the construction industry, have been consistently growing in North America in the past few years. Despite its market relevance, wide technical applicability and performance, and although literature is vast and comprehensive in the field of applied manufacturing scheduling, CLT flow shop production lines are yet to be tackled. CLT manufacturing process involve customized panels and an extraordinary variety of features that can be incorporated into CLT products, leading to unknown process times, presenting an increased complexity to this system’s schedule optimization. This thesis outlines the development and methodology of a scheduling algorithm for customizable CLT panels manufacturing. The proposed scheduling algorithm relies on empirical process time estimation models for each production stage to generate the required inputs, based on a list of required panels, their characteristics and features. The algorithm uses discrete event simulation and dispatch rules to generate a heuristic solution to the flow shop problem, aiming to minimize the average bundle finishing time and the total number of job shuffles in the buffer areas. Next, the scheduling algorithm is encapsulated in a scheduling tool which is applied to emulate a real production plant. The outputs of the scheduling tool provide crucial insight for production planners, allowing managers to make informed decisions to properly schedule concurring projects, optimizing limited resources in the plant, counting on a systematic, daily-generated production work order for each stage. Multiple work orders can be updated as desired with the proposed scheduling algorithm.