Planning and Scheduling

Full course description

In many real-world processes, particularly in industrial processes and logistics, decisions need to be taken about the time of the completion of (sub)tasks, and the decision about what production machines complete the tasks. There are often constraints on the order in which tasks, or ‘jobs’ can be performed, and there are usually capacity constraints of the machines. This leads to natural, industrially critical optimization problems. For example, a company might choose to buy many machines to process jobs, but then there is a risk that the machines will be underused, which is economically inefficient. On the other hand, too few machines, or an inappropriate ordering of tasks,  may lead to machines spending a significant amount of time standing idle, waiting for the output of other machines, which are overcrowded with tasks. In this course, we look at various mathematical models and techniques for optimizing planning and scheduling problems, subject to different optimality criteria. We will discuss, among others, single-machine models, parallel-machine models, job-shop models, and algorithms for planning and scheduling (exact, approximate, heuristic) and we also touch upon the computational complexity (distinguishing between ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ problems) of the underlying problems. Last but not least, we will also introduce integer linear programming as a uniform and generic tool to model and solve planning and scheduling problems.