A decision support system for production scheduling in the printing industry

In this paper it is described a Decision Support System (DSS) designed to support the scheduling of operations in the printing industry modelled as a job-shop problem. The paper is focused on the development of heuristics whose main objectives are, on one hand, to minimize the number of tardy jobs, their lateness in respect to due dates, as well as the mean job flow time and, on the other hand, they seek to maximise the utilisation of the work centres. The role of these heuristics in the DSS consists in the generation of initial schedules (that may then be improved in interactive sessions) and/or in the automatic completion of schedules partly defined by the planning agent. This DSS also presents the possibility of interaction with the planning agent, allowing him to impose different processing sequences in one or more centres identified as critical (bottlenecks) with the aim to increase the global performance of the final schedule having in mind several conflicting objectives. The heuristics determine the operations scheduling on the remaining work centres in an automatic way. Experiences in an industrial environment (a graphic company) have been carried out and the results are considered good in respect to the most important objectives for the company.