ABSTRACT
Scheduling occurs in many environments; the focus of this case study is scheduling in manufacturing industry. A general description of scheduling is the allocation of resources over time to perform a collection of tasks (Baker, 1974). This ‘classical’ approach to scheduling problems has been formalised into the underlying framework referred to as scheduling theory. Scheduling in practice, however, varies greatly between different companies with no definitive model of ‘real world’ scheduling available to aid manufacturing industry. Overlooking the realities of scheduling has resulted in many industries being far from successful in their development of planning and scheduling systems, or in their understanding of the role of the human scheduler within these systems. Instead, businesses have exploited the increasing trend for IT solutions to automate planning and scheduling decision-making processes. However, these systems approach production scheduling as a well defined mathematical problem in contrast to the reality of people carrying out scheduling as a dynamic process. The business’ simple, implicit assumption is that the human scheduler will ‘solve’ most of the problems that arise.
