Manufacturing systems, regardless of their size, have to work with scarce resources in dynamic environments. Managers are asked to assign production facilities over time to parallel activities respecting operational constraints and deadlines while keeping resource costs as low as possible. Thus, classic scheduling approaches are not adequate when (i) a task simultaneously requires a set of different resources and (ii) a trade-off between different objectives (like time, cost and workload balance) should be reached. In such a case, more sophisticated models and algorithms should be brought...

Manufacturing systems, regardless of their size, have to work with scarce resources in dynamic environments. Managers are asked to assign production facilities over time to parallel activities respecting operational constraints and deadlines while keeping resource costs as low as possible. Thus, classic scheduling approaches are not adequate when (i) a task simultaneously requires a set of different resources and (ii) a trade-off between different objectives (like time, cost and workload balance) should be reached. In such a case, more sophisticated models and algorithms should be brought...