720145Systems Integration - 'HARVEST'ClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKPlanning and scheduling of the use of machines and personnel for the processing and manufacture of perishable food products is, in most food plants, a manually intensive activity. Last minute variation in order volumes, unpredictable machine failure and the corresponding disparity in required and available human skills leads to poor optimization of machine and human resources, excessive wastage of raw food materials and storage costs. The HARVEST Project will develop and prototype a real-time, dynamic ‘Planning & Scheduling System for Perishable Food Production’ to significantly reduce waste, improve resource utilization and to make production more responsive to the end-customer needs. The key innovations include the : a) Algorithms that undertake the planning and scheduling activity to reflect the business rules of perishable foods production, tracking and audit legislation, human and machine resource availability and capability, and the cost of manufacturing objectives; b) Algorithms that determine the deviation from the plan against actual tracked production activity and which also identify the cause of the discrepancy and so provide decision support when undertaking any remedial planning activity; c) Distributed production machine devices that feed the operational details to the back-end dynamic modelling engine, to enable real-time monitoring of actual against planned, and which allow change-of-plan instructions to be passed to the machine operators; and d) Investigation into the construction of plans and schedules that enable multiple sites to collaborate in the optimal cost effective completion of production orders. Development and Prototype demonstrators will be deployed and evaluated. The aim is to confirm the suitability for resolving last minute order variation and unpredicted variability in the available production resources while achieving optimal production cost.