Production and Manpower Scheduling

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A general description of scheduling is the allocation of resources over time to perform a collection of tasks. Inliterature, this critical approach to scheduling problems has been formalized as scheduling theory. Schedulingin practice, however, varies greatly between different companies with no definitive model of "real world"scheduling available to aid manufacturing industries. The lack of attention to the realities of scheduling by theresearch community has given the rise to the so-called ''gap" between theory and practice. Many researcherswere simply optimistic that their new and improved heuristics would be embedded in a computer systems byscheduling software vendors, which would then in turn be widely used in job shops. However, most job shopstyle factories are still scheduling and planning the old-fashioned way using a collection of dispatching rulesthat are far from being optimal. It is apparent that theoretical research in developing algorithms for schedulinghas done little to improve the scheduling practice. This has resulted in many industries not having schedulingsystems very tailored to their needs. The research problem identified in the collaborating industry involves thescheduling of large numbers of orders in the stamping area of the manufacturing plant. Complexity arises fromthe many inter-dependencies of the manufacturing operations and their requirements. The schedulingframework and the solution methodology to be develop is a hybrid approach that combines Job-Dispatchingrules from traditional scheduling theory and Event-Scheduling/Time-Advance algorithm (ESTA) from thetheory of discrete event systems simulation. Job-dispatching rule are simple to use. However, they lack theability to handle complex operational logic and do not provide schedule. To obtain actual production scheduleusing these simple dispatching rules, in this research, we will apply the concept of discrete event simulation. Indoing so, the operational logic of the manufacturing systems will be modeled in a computer program. Thedispatching rules will then be executed in a simulated time using ESTA algorithm of discrete event systemssimulation to generate production schedules.