The scheduler’s balancing act of sensing and reacting: a behavioural perspective on scheduling

Abstract

The scheduler has been extensively studied from the point of view of their schedules, using operations research. However, the scheduler not only fulfils a decision-maker role but also an informational role, responding to requests and disruptions, both from the supply and the demand side. Responding in a timely manner to such requests and disruptions is paramount for the scheduling job. Using a field study with job shadowing of schedulers in a Fortune 500 chemical company, we characterise the scheduler’s workflow in a simulation model; this allows us to discriminate between contextual factors of the scheduler’s job and behavioural factors inherent to them. Furthermore, it explicitly assesses the effect of increasing the frequency sensing of the outer world on responsiveness. Our findings show that the studied schedulers prioritise sensing activities related to checking emails rather than monitoring for disruptions in a decision support system. Thus, we find a higher potential for relative improvement in terms of responding to possible disruptions shown in decision support systems rather than responding to email requests. Moreover, we show that by adjusting email frequency checking and preemption behaviours, it is possible to revert an out of control situation to finite response times.

Keywords:

• scheduler
• preemption
• sensing and reacting
• behavioural operations management

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to also thank Professor Claudia Antonini for her valuable comments on improving this paper. Finally, the authors would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments and suggestions helped us to improve the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is a partial result of the project 4C4 More Dynalog: Cross Chain Control Centers-More, which is supported by Dinalog, Dutch Institute for Advanced Logistics.