Real-Time Task Scheduling and Resource Planning for IIoT-Based Flexible Manufacturing with Human-Machine Interaction

Abstract

The emergence of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) presents new challenges in Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments. Unlike traditional real-time systems, FMS must accommodate task set variability driven by human-machine interaction. As such variations can lead to abrupt resource overload or idleness, a dynamic scheduling mechanism is required. Although prior studies have explored dynamic scheduling, they often relax deadlines for lower-criticality tasks, which is not well suited to IIoT systems with strict deadline constraints. In this paper, instead of treating dynamic scheduling as a prediction problem, we model it as deterministic planning in response to explicit, observable user input. To this end, we precompute feasible resource plans for anticipated task set variations through offline optimization and switch to the appropriate plan at runtime. During this process, our approach jointly optimizes processor speeds, memory allocations, and edge/cloud offloading decisions, which are mutually interdependent. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves up to 73.1% energy savings compared to a baseline system, 100% deadline compliance for real-time production tasks, and low-latency responsiveness for user-interaction tasks. We anticipate that the proposed framework will contribute to the design of efficient, adaptive, and sustainable manufacturing systems.