An Integrated Real-Time Autonomous Production Planning and Scheduling System for Aerospace Manufacturing Systems Muhammad Akhtar #1 , Ammar Al-Bazi #2 , Tunde Adediran #3 , Shaun Rowley #4 1,4 ANT Industries Ltd 20 Carlyon Rd, Atherstone, CV9 1LQ,UK 1 Muhammad.Akhtar@antindustries.com 4 Shaun.rowley@antindustries.com 2,3 School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Automotive Engineering Coventry University 11Gulson Road, Coventry, CV1 2JH, UK 2 aa8635@coventry.ac.uk 3 adedirat@uni.coventry.ac.uk Abstract- The application of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) is becoming very popular in manufacturing environment because of its capacity to support real-time autonomous system. In recent manufacturing system environment, manufacturers are now more interested in real-time occurrences with production resources that might impact production planning and scheduling. As a result, this study proposed an integrated real-time autonomous framework, which includes ABM, its messaging system, Access system and SQL to resolve paper scheduling problem and improve utilisation and interaction of machines and operators in a shop-floor setting in real-time. A computational experiment was conducted which revealed an improved total production time after the implementation of the proposed solution. Keywords- Manufacturing, Autonomous Control Systems, Production Planning and Scheduling, Aerospace Products. I. INTRODUCTION Planning and scheduling are an important part of manufacturing production framework, which is essential for resource allocation in respect to capacity availability. Through planning and scheduling, resources capacities, demand and supply and time periods are considered over a long planning horizon [1]. Specifically, planning is done with time horizon ranging from period of days, weeks, months and years. Scheduling, on the other hand, relates to the process of allocating limited resources over time [2]. In an aerospace manufacturing system, production planning and scheduling is challenging due to the complexity involved with its processes. The complexity relates to high volume products and large setups with limited resources allocation [3]. For this reason, managing production in aerospace industry is distinctly different compared to other manufacturing systems. The issues of inadequacies in production planning and scheduling in this kind of complex environment can be very expensive to control in terms of tardiness and late jobs. Hence, the need for autonomous system that can help to effectively manage production and scheduling tasks in real-time. In recent years, the use of simulation techniques has been adopted by manufacturers to help predict possible outcomes with the aim of improving production processes and overall performance. One of the simulation techniques that have gained popularity in industry especially for real-time production planning and scheduling problem is agent-based modelling. The autonomous capability of agent-based modelling is one of the most important features that makes it very applicable for the current planning and scheduling problem. The rest of this paper is organised thus; section II presents the project description while in section III the literature of related studies is reviewed and presented. Section IV presents the solution approach and section V discusses real-life aerospace manufacturer example. Section VI discusses the experimental result of the implementation of the proposed approach. In section VII is the conclusion and recommendation presented. II. PROJECT DESCRIPTION This is one of the Knowledge Exchange and Enterprise Network (KEEN) projects that is partially funded by the European Regional Development Fund looking at improving production planning and scheduling practice in one of the aerospace manufacturers based in the UK. This project started January 2018 at a funding equal to £31k to support ANT Industries Ltd in their shop-floor productivity improvements. The project contains three requirements Machine/Operator Utilisation, Schedule Production and lead time analysis. The problem being solved in this project is that ANT Industries currently use paper-based scheduling. This project will allow them to simultaneously schedule production. Not only this, the project will provide them to analyse when orders will complete resulting with the