An interactive procedure for bi-criteria production scheduling

In this paper, a scheduling problem is analysed in which the scheduler desires to minimize both the tardiness of the jobs and the incurred set-up costs. Unlike existing bi-criteria scheduling formulations, the approach developed in this paper does not utilize a weighted objective function. Because the application studied is dynamic in that the importance of each criterion varies over time, an interactive approach is developed that allows the decision maker to evaluate the job assignments. By analysing simulations of the application, the procedure is shown to be efficient in that the elapsed time between the decision maker’s input and the system’s response was within 5.3 sec. Furthermore, the system was able to reduce the number of feasible sequences by an average of 55% which allowed a decision to be made in six or fewer iterations.