An investigation of the advantages of using a man-computer interactive scheduling methodology for job shops

Scheduling has been a difficult problem for job shops which manufacture discrete parts. The research described in this paper investigates the hypothesis that interactive man-computer scheduling methodology is more effective in this task than a batch scheduling methodology. This hypothesis is investigated under eight different problem configurations generated by varying three job description parameters. The results have been evaluated statistically and the effectiveness of an interactive schedule compared to the slack-per-remaining-operation heuristic is investigated. Influences of the level of variation in job description parameters on the quality of the interactive schedule have also been analysed in this study. Results show that scheduling interactively is significantly more effective in most problem situations, and that the level of variation of some of the parameters has a significant impact on the quality of the interactive schedule.