Introduction to scheduling

Abstract

Scheduling problems are encountered in all types of systems, since it is necessary to organise and/or distribute the work between many entities. We find in every book in the literature a definition of a scheduling problem as well as its principal components. Among these definitions we can quote the following one [Carlier and Chrétienne, 1988]:

“Scheduling is to forecast the processing of a work by assigning resources to tasks and fixing their start times. [...] The different components of a scheduling problem are the tasks, the potential constraints, the resources and the objective function.[...] The tasks must be programmed to optimise a specific objective [...] Of course, often it will be more realistic in practice to consider several criteria.”