ABSTRACT
Production scheduling problems concern the allocation of limited resources over time to perform tasks to satisfy certain criteria. Resources can be of a very different nature, for example, manpower, money, machines, tools, materials, energy, and so on. Tasks can have a variety of interpretations from machining parts in manufacturing systems up to processing information in computer systems. A task is usually characterized by some factors, such as ready time, due date, relative urgency weight, processing time, resource consumption, and so on. Moreover, a structure of a set of tasks, reflecting precedence constraints among them, can be defined in different ways. In addition, different criteria that measure the quality of the performance of a schedule can be taken into account.
