Cumulative Delay Based Reactive Scheduling Policy-Its Application to Single-Machine Dynamic Scheduling

Reactive scheduling being discussed in the framework of dynamic scheduling is considered as an effective production control strategy in manufacturing systems. We have proposed a decision making model for reactive scheduling based on the critical number of delayed tasks which can be a measure to determine a suitable timing of schedule revision. In this paper, we propose a generalized policy called cumulative delay based reactive scheduling policy based on our previous work, which can be applicable to scheduling decision under a dynamic environment such as random job arrivals, changes of due date, and so on. Through some computational experiments, we examine not only basic properties but the effectiveness of the proposed policy by applying it to single-machine dynamic scheduling problems with sequence-dependent set-up, random machine breakdowns and underestimation of job processing times, where we minimize total set-ups as well as scheduling frequency. We also demonstrate that the proposed policy with even low scheduling frequency can outperform a typical event-driven rescheduling policy.