Adaptive Scheduling

Abstract

In the area of industrial production planning, scheduling problems have been subject of intensive research over the last 50 years. The common focus of scheduling is on the efficient allocation of one or more resources to activities over time. Due to its convenience, the terminology used in production is also adopted for scheduling in other fields, e.g. in transportation, public traffic systems, power plants, to mention just a few. We follow this line and refer to a job as a complex consisting of one or more activities and to a machine as a resource that can perform one activity at a time. Among the variety of different scheduling problems the classical job shop problem is the most studied one by academic research. It can be doubted, however, whether the problem owes its reputation from an outstanding importance in shop-floor management. Viewing the job shop problem as a benchmark for the comparison of scheduling algorithms is probably more suitable. For this purpose the job shop problem is undoubtedly an ideal candidate because it generates an enormous complexity from few input data by including at least some features of the real-world.