1. INTRODUCTION
SCHEDULING CAN GENERALLY be described as
allocating a set of resources over time to
perform a set of tasks. Scheduling emerges in
various domains, such as nurse scheduling,
aeroplane landing scheduling, train scheduling,
production scheduling. This paper focuses on
the latter, i.e. production scheduling. In
production systems, scheduling typically concerns
allocating a set of machines to perform
a set of work within a certain time period. The
result of scheduling is a schedule, which can be
defined as: a plan with reference to the
sequence of, and time allocated for each item,
or operation necessary to complete the
item [1].
Much has been written about scheduling
problems in the last few decades. Yet, in spite of
the vast body of research, and the fact that
many practitioners in operations management
are convinced that manual scheduling is highly
capable of improvement, implementations of
scheduling techniques in practice are scarce.
Until recently, the lack of innovation in
industrial production scheduling could be
attributed to the fact that much of the scientific
research had been aimed at strongly simplified
problems which were not representative of
practice, e.g. small-sized problems, deterministic
arrival and processing times. However, today
academia has moved its focus to real-world
problems, and many scheduling techniques are
now available in standard software. The number
of software packages at hand for production
scheduling appears to rise by the day. However,
in spite of the large amount of available
techniques, successful implementations of these
techniques are limited.
To improve the applicability of scheduling
techniques in practice, it is necessary that we
learn from shortcomings of techniques
identified by others. However, a major shortcoming
of scheduling research is that it is widely
dispersed over many research communities and
journals. Therefore, we aim to give an overview
in this paper of the research done on the
applicability of techniques in practice. Moreover,
the research on the human factor in
scheduling will be reviewed, for two reasons:
firstly, humans are still the key element of
scheduling in practice, and secondly, the success