The Problem RotoScheduler Solves
Rotational molding plants already know roughly what they need to make from weekly or monthly master plans. The hard daily question is the detailed one: given live orders, due dates, and inventory targets, exactly which orders should run on which machine, on which arm and spider, in which production cycle, and on which day?
Done by hand, this trades off goals that pull against each other. RotoScheduler is designed to plan that level automatically and explain its choices, optimizing for:
Meet due dates
Cover demand on time, raise the priority of orders whose ship dates are approaching, and clearly flag any demand it cannot fit.
Reduce mold changeovers
Keep molds that are already installed on an arm running across consecutive cycles while demand lasts, instead of mounting and removing molds more often than needed.
Use machines well
Improve spider and machine-day utilization, prefer smaller machines, and avoid opening a machine for a day with too little work to justify the startup.
Respect process rules
Only group molds that may share an arm and cycle, based on material, wall thickness, and heating-time tolerance, before any layout is attempted.
Built on the RotoSpider Engine
RotoScheduler does not re-implement mold geometry. For every candidate mold group it asks the same RotoSpider layout engine that powers the RotoSpider trial: can these molds be mounted together on this machine arm and spider, how many fit, what is the spider utilization, and is the load balanced around the rotation axis?
That division of labor keeps each product focused:
RotoSpider answers fit
Given a set of molds and a specific arm and spider, RotoSpider decides whether they physically fit, how many load, and how good the layout is.
RotoScheduler answers when and where
It maps orders to products and molds, forms process-compatible mold groups, calls RotoSpider to confirm each group is buildable, then sequences feasible groups across machines, arms, cycles, and days.
Because the scheduler relies on RotoSpider for feasibility, the layout quality you can see in the RotoSpider trial today is the same foundation the schedule is built on.
Customized and Deployed Per Factory
Rotomolding scheduling rules are not the same from plant to plant. Machine and arm topology, mold inventory and per-cycle yield, which molds may share a cycle, daily cycle capacity, changeover effort, shift and maintenance calendars, and how strongly due dates and machine preferences are weighed all differ by factory.
For that reason RotoScheduler is delivered as a configurable scheduling engine that is customized and deployed for each factory, following that factory's own scheduling rules. In a typical deployment the engine performs the mold grouping, layout feasibility, scheduling, and constraint checking, while the plant's MOM / MES system owns routine data maintenance, the planner's interface, and integration with upstream and downstream planning. When a planner edits a schedule by hand, the engine can re-check the hard constraints and re-score the result.
Interested? Let's Talk
RotoScheduler is still in development, so there is no public trial download yet. If you run or integrate rotomolding production and want scheduling that respects your real machines, molds, and process rules, we would like to understand your requirements and discuss a pilot.
Contact us at zhzx@zhihuo.com. In the meantime, you can already try the layout engine RotoScheduler is built on in the RotoSpider trial.
Related Tools
RotoScheduler and RotoSpider are the rotomolding pair. For container loading, see the SmartPacker editions.
Rotomolding Mold Layout
Plan mold layouts on machine spiders with straight-arm and offset-arm geometry. Available as a Windows trial today.
View RotoSpiderMixed Carton Loading
Multiple carton sizes with six orientations and interactive quantity tuning.
View T3