Patent ID: 8725546

Claim:
A system of scheduling a plurality of jobs in a chemical production environment, the system comprising: a plurality of resources configured for chemical production; a computing device; and a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium in communication with the computing device, wherein the computer-readable storage medium comprises one or more programming instructions that, when executed, caused the computing device to: receive a plurality of jobs and at least one setup characteristic corresponding to each job, wherein each job has a corresponding job size, wherein the at least one setup characteristic is associated with preparing at least one of the plurality of chemical production resources for processing a chemical product, determine, for each job, whether the corresponding job size exceeds a job size threshold, group each job having a job size that exceeds the job size threshold into a large job subgroup, group each job having a job size that does not exceed the job size threshold into a small job subgroup, route the small job to a small job autonomous cell comprising one or more resources for processing the small job subgroup, classify the large job subgroup as a high setup subgroup or a low setup subgroup based on the setup characteristics corresponding to each job in the large job subgroup, by: identifying one or more setup characteristics associated with the large job subgroup, wherein each setup characteristic has one or more associated types, for each setup characteristic, determining the number of types associated with the large job subgroup, determining that the large job subgroup is a high setup subgroup if the number of associated types of at least one setup characteristic exceeds a threshold value associated with the setup characteristic, and determining that the large job subgroup is a low setup subgroup if, for each setup characteristic, the number of corresponding types does not exceed the threshold value associated with the setup characteristic, and route the large job subgroup to a large job autonomous cell wherein, if the large job subgroup is a high setup, the large job autonomous cell comprises one or more first resources for processing the large job subgroup and wherein, if the large job subgroup is a low setup subgroup, the large job autonomous cell comprises one or more second resources for processing the large job subgroup.