ABSTRACT
Most facilities around the world have a job shop structure, with output that is highly variable and produced in small quantities. Scheduling is a critical part of these facilities’ operations. Meeting agreed-upon deadlines, for example, has a direct relationship with customer satisfaction. Thus, it presents a difficult problem for the operations planner, often known as the scheduler, to make the best scheduling selections.
It should be noted that orders and work centers on the shop floor can be used to gather the data needed for scheduling, making this another area where digital data is crucial. Scheduling a work center finds out not only when jobs begin and end at the work center, but also the sequence of jobs that are fed into that center: A scheduler uses priority rules, also known as heuristics, to order — or sequence — the jobs assigned to the work center.
Depending on the structure of the production environment, a scheduler might come across four distinct scenarios: (1) Scheduling n jobs on a single workstation; (2) Scheduling n jobs on two different work centers; (3) Scheduling n jobs across m number of multiple work centers; (4) Scheduling n tasks across n number of work centers. The most basic type of operations scheduling problem is sequencing a series of jobs on a single work center, but the last two industrial settings demand sophisticated mathematical models to generate a correct schedule. The chapter concludes by delving into various scheduling assumptions, such as whether work centers can process the same jobs concurrently or not.
