The Impact of Downtime on the Stability of the Production Schedule

Production scheduling is a fundamental element for the efficient control of material flow in production processes. Research work concerns the approaches, methods and tools used to optimize the loading of production resources with production orders, taking into account various evaluation criteria. From a manufacturers’ point of view, one important objective is to ensure the timely fulfilment of customer orders. The emergence of disruptive factors causing downtime (e.g., machine breakdowns and adjustments) in the realization of production processes negatively affects the realization of this objective. In this case, it is necessary to rebuild the production schedule to make the production capacity more realistic. This paper presents a study on the impact of downtime on production schedules developed according to different principles and rules. The aim was to determine which of these affects the stability of the production schedule, i.e., causing less need for changes as a result of the occurrence of downtime in the execution of production orders. The research experiments were conducted for various production flow models and structures of products and production orders. The subject of this research is important and relevant to the impact and inclusion of maintenance tasks in the operation of production systems.