Scheduling (production processes)

Scheduling is an important tool for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a process. In manufacturing, the purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by telling a production facility what to make, when, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation and reduce costs.


Production scheduling tools greatly outperform older manual scheduling methods. This provides the production scheduler with powerful graphical interfaces which can be used to visually optimize real-time work loads in various stages of the production, and pattern recognition allows the software to automatically create scheduling opportunities which might not be apparent without this view into the data. For example, an airline might wish to minimize the number of airport gates required for its aircraft, in order to reduce costs, and scheduling software can allow the planners to see how this can be done, by analyzing time tables, aircraft usage, or the flow of passengers.

Companies use backward and forward scheduling to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials.

Forward scheduling is planning the tasks from the date resources become available to determine the shipping date or the due date.

Backward scheduling is planning the tasks from the due date or required-by date to detemine the start date and/or any changes in capacity required.


The benefits of production scheduling include:

* Process change-over reduction
* Inventory reduction, leveling
* Reduced scheduling effort
* Increased production efficiency
* Labor load leveling
* Accurate delivery date quotes
* Real time information


Scheduling Algorithms

Production scheduling can take a significant amount of computing power if there are a large number of tasks. Therefore a range of short-cut algorithms (Heuristic) are used:

* Modified Due Date Scheduling Heuristic
* Shortest Processing Time Scheduling Heuristic
* Earliest Due Date Scheduling Heuristic
* GreedyET Scheduling Heuristic