Production Scheduling Approaches for Operations Management

Scheduling is essentially the short-term execution plan of a production planning model. Production scheduling consists of the activities performed in a manufacturing company in order to manage and control the execution of a production process. A schedule is an assignment problem that describes into details (in terms of minutes or seconds) which activities must be performed and how the factory’s resources should be utilized to satisfy the plan. Detailed scheduling is essentially the problem of allocating machines to competing jobs over time, subject to the constraints. Each work center can process one job at a time and each machine can handle at most one task at a time. A scheduling problem, typically, assumes a fixed number of jobs and each job has its own parameters (i.e., tasks, the necessary sequential constraints, the time estimates for each operation and the required resources, no cancellations). All scheduling approaches require some estimate of how long it takes to perform the work. Scheduling affects, and is affected by, the shop floor organization. All scheduling changes can be projected over time enabling the identification and analysis of starting time, completion times, idle time of resources, lateness, etc....