Research activities in manufacturing and production control are constantly growing, leading to an increasing variety of scheduling and control solutions, each of them with specific assumptions and possible advantages. Despite this, a very small number attain the stage of industrial implementation or even tests in real conditions for several reasons. One of these reasons is the difficulty to provide robust, reliable performance evaluation of the control systems proposed that would convince industrials to take the risk to implement it.

Benchmarking is comparing the output of different systems for a given set of input data in order to improve the system’s performance. In the constantly evolving research environment, with a unceasingly increasing importance paid to quality of results, researchers from the production control community, and a growing number of researchers from the OR community, are still seeking for a benchmark that can help them to characterize the static and dynamic behaviors of their control system, taking realistic production constraints into account.

Drawn from the experience of the authors, it was interesting to define a benchmark,allying the advantages of the benchmarks proposed by both communities, usable by both communities, and based upon a physical, real-world system to stimulate benchmarking activities to be grounded in reality. This work is also consistent with the current determination of the IFAC TC 5.1, which tries to design, use and disseminate of manufacturing control benchmarks.

This website has been designed from the following paper:

Trentesaux D., Pach C., Bekrar A., Sallez Y., Berger T., Bonte T., Leitao P., Barbosa J. (2013). Benchmarking Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling and Control Systems. Control Engineering Practice, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.conengprac.2013.05.004/.