Applying Local Rescheduling in response to schedule disruptions

In realistic scenarios of disruption management the high number of potential options makes the provision of decision support–on how to get back on track–complex. It is thus desirable to reduce the size of the regarded problems by applying methods of partial rescheduling. As existing approaches (such as Affected Operations Rescheduling or Matchup Scheduling) mainly focus on production-specific problems, we propose Local Rescheduling (LRS) as a generic approach to partial rescheduling in this paper. It integrates previous research on partial rescheduling and local search in the context of complex project scheduling problems. LRS is based on the bidirectional incremental extension of a time window regarded for potential schedule modifications. Experiments show that LRS outperforms previous approaches.