ABSTRACT
There are many planning and scheduling papers whose opening lines, quite rightly, extol the importance of effective production planning and shop floor control to the success of a manufacturing company. A vast body of the literature on planning and scheduling focuses on scheduling theory (a mathematical approach seeking optimal solutions to the scheduling problem) or on artificial intelligence (e.g. modelling human expertise and integrating that expertise into a computer system) with the ultimate objective of incorporating these algorithms or elicited knowledge into computer-based scheduling systems. Other literature focuses on the organisation of planning and scheduling, looking at how layers of control within planning and scheduling should be organised (e.g. Bauer et al., 1994; Doumeingts et al., 1995; Williams et al., 1994). A small but significant number of papers focus on the role of the human in planning and scheduling and take an interdisciplinary approach to research, borrowing concepts from the social sciences, cognitive psychology and organisational behaviour (see Crawford and Wiers, Chapter 2). Many of the studies that focus on the human in planning and scheduling have had the objective of developing some form of decision support system and only a few authors have attempted to examine other issues such as re-evaluating the hierarchical paradigm for planning and scheduling (see McKay et al., 1995a) or examining CAPM systems introduction from a social and organisational perspective (see Hardstone, 1991;Mahenthiran et al., 1999).
