Let us first describe the purpose of this book, starting with the explanation of its title. In general, scheduling problems can be understood very broadly as the problems of allocating resources over time to perform a set of tasks being parts of some processes, among which computational and manufacturing ones are most important. Tasks individually compete for resources which can be of a very different nature, e.g. manpower, money, processors (machines), energy, tools. The same is true for task characteristics, e.g. ready times, due dates, relative ur- gency weights, functions describing task...

The central purpose of this book is to acquaint the reader especially with the cases of local search based learning as well as to introduce methods of constraint based reasoning, both with respect to their use in automated manufacturing. We restrict our attention to job shop scheduling as well as to one-machine scheduling with sequence dependent setup times. Additionally some design and planning issues in flexible manufacturing systems are considered. General purpose search methods which in particular include methods from local search such as simulated annealing, tabu search, and genetic...

This book explores scheduling problems in advanced planning and computer systems. The text examines a range of parameters: job priority, release times, due dates, processing times, resource usage and more, focusing on such aspects as computer systems and supply chain management.