The complexity of scheduling in practice

Successful implementations of scheduling techniques in practice are scarce. Not only do daily disturbances lead to a gap between theory and practice, but also the extent to which a scheduling technique can adequately model the processes on the shopfloor, and the extent to which the optimization goal of a technique matches the organizational goal are not great enough. Further, the schedulers’ actions may play an important role in the fulfilment of the generated schedules. The organizational structure with its different responsibilities and conflicting goals may also result in the poor performance of scheduling techniques. Besides these, there is the problem of measuring the quality of a schedule. Discusses the causes for these gaps and illustrates the solutions to improve scheduling by way of a case study.