Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling and optimizing work and workloads in a production process or manufacturing process. Scheduling is used to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials. It is an important tool for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a process. In manufacturing, the purpose of scheduling is to keep due dates of customers and then minimize the production time and costs, by telling a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation, utilize maximum resources available and reduce costs. In some situations, scheduling can involve random attributes, such as random processing times, random due dates, random weights, and stochastic machine breakdowns. In this case, the scheduling problems are referred to as "stochastic scheduling".

Overview

Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling and optimizing work and workloads in a production process. Companies use backward and forward scheduling to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials. The benefits of production scheduling include: Production scheduling tools greatly outperform older manual scheduling methods. These provide the production scheduler with powerful graphical interfaces which can be used to visually optimize real-time work loads in various stages of production, and pattern recognition allows the software to automatically create scheduling opportunities which might not be apparent without this view into the data. For example, an airline might wish to minimize the number of airport gates required for its aircraft, in order to reduce costs, and scheduling software can allow the planners to see how this can be done, by analysing time tables, aircraft usage, or the flow of passengers.

Key concepts in scheduling

A key character of scheduling is the productivity, the relation between quantity of inputs and quantity of output. Key concepts here are:

Scheduling algorithms

Production scheduling can take a significant amount of computing power if there are a large number of tasks. Therefore, a range of short-cut algorithms (heuristics) (a.k.a. dispatching rules) are used:

Batch production scheduling

Batch production scheduling is the practice of planning and scheduling of batch manufacturing processes. Although scheduling may apply to traditionally continuous processes such as refining, it is especially important for batch processes such as those for pharmaceutical active ingredients, biotechnology processes and many specialty chemical processes. Batch production scheduling shares some concepts and techniques with finite capacity scheduling which has been applied to many manufacturing problems.