Integral Approaches to Integrated Scheduling

Abstract

In this chapter we have tried to address some integrative views for the production scheduling problem; namely resources integration, cost elements integration and solution methodologies integration. Representative literature was also covered. The integrative views oriented our attention to the necessity of having a diagnosis methodology assessing the criticality among resources and hence guiding to appropriate formulations and solution methodologies. The development of a criticality evaluation tool is hence an important research avenue. More research avenues can be suggested. Relevant costs are of special interest when tackling a scheduling problem. This stresses the need for developing cost estimation tools for this purpose. The study of sequences and identification of dominance criteria when solving an integrated scheduling problem is also very important in the understanding and development of solution approaches. Performance of approaches is most of the time data dependant, so data analysis to guide the choice of approaches is necessary. There has been no effort in exploiting the structural properties of the integrated scheduling problems. Here is an avenue to explore. Development of search strategies and propagation algorithms is also a promising area for enhancing the performance of both operations research and constraint programming techniques. Our current and future research involves using a number of performing tools such as Tabu search to solve the integrated scheduling problem. Hybridizations with other approaches are being envisaged since tools are sometimes complementary. Objective functions with different cost components are also being used in the different problems under study.