Design and Implementation of Scheduling Systems: More Advanced Concepts

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a number of issues that have come up in recent years in the design, development, and implementation of scheduling systems. The first section discusses issues concerning uncertainty, robustness and reactive decision making. In practice, schedules often have to be changed because of random events. The more robust the original schedule is, the easier the rescheduling is. This section focuses on the generation of robust schedules as well as on the measurement of their robustness. The second section considers machine learning mechanisms. No system can consistently generate good solutions that are to the liking of the user. The decision-maker often has to tweak the schedule generated by the system in order to make it usable. A well-designed system can learn from past adjustments made by the user the mechanism that enables the system to do this is called a learning mechanism. The third section focuses on the design of scheduling engines. An engine often contains an entire library of algorithms