Fast Generation of Production Schedules on a Single Machine

摘要

Many approaches to production scheduling are based on the step by step improvement of a given schedule. For these, finding a "good" initial schedule may critically influence performance. In the following, an extremely fast and simple method is presented for finding such a schedule in the case of a continuous-time single machine problem with the goal of minimizing setup and holding costs. In the case where there are no setups, this method always finds the optimal solution. A benchmark illustrates the possibilities of the method.