Analysis of reactive scheduling problems in manufacturing systems

Abstract

In this study we develop a new scheduling algorithm for the job shop problem. The proposed algorithm is a heuristic method based on the filtered beam search. After extensive analyses on the evaluation functions and search parameters of the beam search, we measure the performance of the algorithm in terms of quality of solutions and CPU times for both the makespan and mean tardiness criteria. In the second half of the research, we study the reactive scheduling problem. Specifically, we analyze several reactive methods such as no response, periodic response and continuous response under various experimental conditions. The beam search based partial scheduling is also studied in this thesis. The method is analyzed for both deterministic and stochastic environments under several job shop configurations.