A Prioritized Re-Insertion Approach to Production Rescheduling

Given a pre-schedule (or a reservation schedule), we examine the problem of rescheduling operations on a single workcenter due to a disruption. We propose an approach where a set of operations around the disruption are un-scheduled and re-inserted one at a time and the goal is to minimize both total tardiness and the ripple (or domino) effect. For determining the order of re-insertion ten priority rules are proposed and tested. Two local adjustment heuristics are developed to improve the schedule after re-insertion. The computational study showed that the approach of using re-insertion heuristics combined with local adjustment heuristics performs very well.