A greedy-based decision support system for scheduling a manufacturing operation

This article is a description of a technique for scheduling jobs over a bottleneck manufacturing operation with many parallel machines, where machine setup times are sequences dependent. A decision support system is utilized to ensure a good starting point, enabling a greedy 0/1 nonpreemptive algorithm to provide ‘good’ to ‘near-optimal’ solutions quickly and efficiently with no manual post-processing. The system has been running weekly in a production environment for more than four years.