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A Comparison of Task Analysis Methods for Planning and Scheduling

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Behavioral Operations in Planning and Scheduling

Abstract

Planning and scheduling experts in practice are often faced with the question of how a company can improve its planning performance. Such improvements can be related to, for example, computer support, organizational task division, performance analysis, etc. The multitude of planning and scheduling factors and their interrelatedness makes it difficult to integrally explain current performance and assess the consequences of changes. We analyze how different perspective on task analysis methods complement each other for the various questions that planning and scheduling experts encounter in practice. There are two main findings. On the one hand, a combination of methods is often necessary in order to avoid myopia and biased results. On the other hand, however, the analysis shows that not all questions require a full-scale analysis of the situation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The reader could refer to Usher and Kaber’s (2000) article to access the complete task decomposition that lists the 37 end nodes of this tree diagram, listing all the individual sub-objectives (4th level) the scheduler has to complete.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Toulouse, Toulousse, France

    Julien Cegarra

  2. Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Wout van Wezel

Authors
  1. Julien Cegarra
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  2. Wout van Wezel
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Correspondence to Julien Cegarra .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. BETA Research School, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 5600 MB, Netherlands

    Jan C. Fransoo

  2. Northwestern Switzerland, School of Applied Psychology, University of Applied Sciences, Riggenbachstrasse 16, Olten, 4600, Switzerland

    Toni Waefler

  3. , Human Factors Group, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom

    John R. Wilson

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Cegarra, J., van Wezel, W. (2010). A Comparison of Task Analysis Methods for Planning and Scheduling. In: Fransoo, J., Waefler, T., Wilson, J. (eds) Behavioral Operations in Planning and Scheduling. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13382-4_13

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