A Rescheduling Procedure for Manufacturing Systems Under Random Disruptions

Short to medium term schedules of a manufacturing system are often produced a priori in order to direct production operations and to support other planning activities such as tooling, raw material delivery and resource allocation. Unfortunately, as soon as the a priori schedule is released to the shop, myriad disturbances will arise which render the schedule obsolete. “Rescheduling” is a means of restoring the operations schedule when such a disruption has occurred. Complications arise when schedule changes induce major cost impact to other planning activities which use the a priori schedule as a basis. This problem of shop rescheduling is of great practical importance and has been addressed in various areas of Operations Research including stochastic scheduling and combinatorial optimization.