Introduction to Control-Based Scheduling

Modern production systems are characterized by resources and the products these resources are designed to manufacture in response to market demand. When demand for products at a time horizon is given, scheduling generally means assigning individual resources to individual products in order to trace the demand along the horizon. Since typically, a large number of possible schedules can be constructed, the problem of scheduling is to select the schedule which ensures optimal functioning of the production system in terms of a certain performance measure. Due to the great variety of production systems, of performance measures as well as of production demand forms, a vast number of scheduling models has been developed to mathematically formalize the scheduling problem.