Computer-aided packing shop scheduling in a manufacturing plant

Consideration is given to the problem of generating weekly production schedules for the packing shop of a processed food manufacturing company. In order to be feasible, a packing shop schedule needs to satisfy a multiplicity of technological and other constraints. In this paper the authors describe this particular scheduling problem and present a procedure developed for the computer-aided scheduling of the packing shop of the company. An interactive computer program, developed in the PROGRESS RDBMS environment, is also presented. The computer-aided scheduling procedure has now been actually implemented, showing considerable improvements over the previous scheduling practice of the company. The paper is concluded with a discussion and proposals for future research.