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Industrial Scheduling in the Digital Era: Challenges, State-of-the-Art Methods, and Deep Learning Perspectives

Alina Itu

Published 2025 in Applied Sciences

ABSTRACT

Industrial scheduling plays a central role in Industry 4.0, where efficiency, robustness, and adaptability are essential for competitiveness. This review surveys recent advances in reinforcement learning, digital twins, and hybrid artificial intelligence (AI)–operations research (OR) approaches, which are increasingly used to address the complexity of flexible job-shop and distributed scheduling problems. We focus on how these methods compare in terms of scalability, robustness under uncertainty, and integration with industrial IT systems. To move beyond an enumerative survey, the paper introduces a structured analysis in three domains: comparative strengths and limitations of different approaches, ready-made tools and integration capabilities, and representative industrial case studies. These cases, drawn from recent literature, quantify improvements such as reductions in makespan, tardiness, and cycle time variability, or increases in throughput and schedule stability. The review also discusses critical challenges, including data scarcity, computational cost, interoperability with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)/Manufacturing Execution System (MES) platforms, and the need for explainable and human-in-the-loop frameworks. By synthesizing methodological advances with industrial impact, the paper highlights both the potential and the limitations of current approaches and outlines key directions for future research in resilient, data-driven production scheduling.

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