Methods for Repair Based Scheduling.pdfVIP

Methods for Repair Based Scheduling YongPing Ran Nico Roos Jaap van den Herik Universiteit Maastricht, Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht. Abstract An important practical problem in schedule execution is the occurrence of unfore- seen events. Whether we consider a schedule for a Job Shop or a timetable for a school, an unexpected event, such as machine breakdowns or personnel illness, that disrupt the execution of the schedule will almost certainly occur once in a while. Hence, it be- comes important to be able to repair a schedule. When repairing a schedule, it is often important to minimise the difference between the new and the original schedule. Since this minimisation objective is a global objec- tive involving the start times of all operations, repair-based scheduling is much harder than predictive scheduling, i.e., creating an schedule from scratch. In this paper, a new constraint-based scheduling approach for repairing a schedule is proposed. This approach aims at repairing standard Job Shop Scheduling Problems. The approach contains a new constraint-propagation method and a new operation se- lection heuristic. 1 Introduction An important practical problem in schedule execution is the occurrence of unforeseen events. Whether we consider a schedule for a Job Shop or a timetable for a school, an unexpected event, such as machine breakdowns or personnel illness, that disrupt the ex- ecution of the schedule will almost certainly occur once in a while. Hence, it becomes important to be able to repair a schedule. We could repair a schedule by generating a new schedule from scratch taking into ac- count the unexpected event that has occurred. Such a new schedule may be quite different from the previous schedule. There is an important reason why such a schedule is undesir- able. An existing schedule represents an investment in planned resources, e.g. allocations of machines and people. It should not be disturbed any more t