COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM

Towards real-life production scheduling

Ruben Ruiz Garcia Department of Applied Statistics, Operations Research and Quality Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain

Wednesday, 03 September, 2008 at 14:15 Auditorium U48

ABSTRACT

Scheduling deals with the allocation of finite resources to tasks over time. In production scheduling, resources are often machines and/or personnel and production orders of given products are the tasks. Theoretical studies about production scheduling started to appear more than 50 years ago when Johnson studied the simple two machine flowshop scheduling problem. However, factories have been scheduling production since the early 20th century, with the production line of Henry Ford and the Gantt diagrams of Henry Gantt. Sadly, the links between academia and industry as far as production scheduling goes are weak. A wide gap between scheduling research and practice has been widely recognized. The reasons for this are manifold. Among them, the sheer variety and complexity of real-life scheduling problems prevail. The main objective of this talk is to introduce the audience to this field and to shed light into the many issues involved in real-life production scheduling.
In the talk, I will first give a brief introduction to the theory of scheduling, in order to bring the audience to terms with scheduling problems and notation. Then, I will move around scheduling problems, mainly flowshops, with increasing levels of complexity and number of realistic features. I will concentrate on the challenges and algorithms used for finding viable solutions. The talk will finish with the problems faced when carrying over this applied scheduling research to real industries.

Host: Marco Chiarandini

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