Manufacturing Systems Scheduling

Efficient management of the production process, in manufacturing systems is a vast subject with decisive impact on major economic entities, like productivity, competitiveness and viability. Production scheduling (i.e., organization and control of production operations in manufacturing systems), is essential for the efficient operation of a production environment. Production scheduling actually concerns the efficient allocation over time of resources for the manufacture of goods, involving decisions such as part release, routing, machine scheduling, set up times etc., with the objective of producing customers’ demands in a timely and economic fashion. Consequently, scheduling attempts to find a way to assign and sequence the use of these shared resources, such that the production constraints are satisfied and production costs are minimized.