A practical approach to production scheduling

Abstract

The paper gives a practical, branch and bound based solution to the scheduling problem as found in real life. Organizational aspects of solving the scheduling problem are considered, and two organizational ideas, ’ the area of responsibility ’ and ’ the time span of action ’, are presented. Intelligibility to administrators and operatives of the output from any scheduling system is emphasized, and the adoption of a wholly new concept, the ’ Generalized Ordered Schedule ’, is advocated as a means of achieving intuitive appeal and improved control. The requirements which any useful scheduling system must satisfy are identified, from field Btudies, and reported. Data are presented on a collection of real problems, and comparisons of decision rule solution procedures with the branch and bound procedure given. These demonstrate that the usually accepted results from conventional simulation and other techniques using artificial job/operation time and technological route matrices are misleading.