Addressing large scale and dynamic scheduling by nature inspired mechanism

Abstract

Scheduling problems are faced in many application domains like manufacturing control, educational timetabling, nurse rostering, and logistics. These problems involve allocation of resources, abide constraints, and often need to optimize against user specified objectives (sometimes multi-objective). Large scale dynamic scheduling (LSDS) problems are a special class of scheduling problems which involves large number of entities (for examples in case of logistics large amount of goods to transport) and environment that can change at runtime (for example breaking of a resource and a new task appearing). The large scale and dynamism, makes LSDS problems even more challenging to address. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.