Production scheduling to satisfy worker’s preferences for days off and overtime under due-date constraints

A worker’s satisfaction level on a production schedule is an important factor to sustain the worker’s morale. An ideal production schedule for the worker accords with the worker’s preferences for days off, overtime, and so on. However, production schedules may not always satisfy the worker’s preferences, because the schedules must often satisfy job due dates. This paper describes a production scheduling problem which seeks to satisfy the worker’s preferences under due-date constraints. A scheduling problem is considered with the objective of satisfying the worker’s wishes on days off without overtime. The solution may not always satisfy all of the workers’ preferences when the work loads are too heavy. Then a scheduling problem is analyzed which minimizes the total overtime necessary to satisfy all the workers’ preferences. These schedulig problems are formulated as linear goal programming problems, and a numerical example is given.