The MICRO-BOSS Scheduling System: Current Status and Future Efforts

Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning

Volume

Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning

Contents

In this paper, a micro-opportunistic approach to factory scheduling was described that closely monitors the evolution of bottlenecks during the construction of the schedule, and continuously redirects search towards the bottleneck that appears to be most critical. This approach differs from earlier opportunistic approaches, such as the one described in [3], as it does not require scheduling large resource subproblems or large job subproblems before revising the current scheduling strategy. This micro-opportunistic approach has been implemented in the context of the MICRO-BOSS factory scheduling system. A study comparing MICRO-BOSS against a macro-opportunistic scheduler suggests that the additional flexibility of the micro-opportunistic approach to scheduling generally yields important reductions in both tardiness and inventory.