Controlling a Production Scheduling System

When using an automatic production scheduling system management require the system to respond to different overall policies, such as clear all arrears or minimize average lateness weighted by job importance. In many commercial scheduling packages there is no quantitative explanation of how to achieve this response. A successfully implemented scheduling system is introduced here where each policy or objective is obtained by selecting the appropriate criterion on which to sort the jobs. An analytical relationship between the policy and the sorting criterion is established. A new type of lateness penalty is developed heuristically, which is basically an exponential function. The sorting criterion to minimise this lateness penalty turns out to be simply sorting by least slack.