A survey investigating current industrial scheduling practice among a cross-section of UK companies

摘要

This paper reports on the findings of a survey that attempts to size the scheduling requirement in industry and investigates the type of scheduling systems and heuristics that are currently used, the extent of their use, and their effectiveness. Today many tools and software packages to assist and solve scheduling problems are available on the market. Both special scheduling tools and scheduling functions incorporated in Material Requirements Planning or Enterprise Resource Planning systems have been developed. However, this research and the results from the survey shows that the manual approach to scheduling is still the most commonly used and often the preferred approach. The survey is focused on a cross-section of businesses including companies of different sizes. The comparison between the findings from the first batch and the findings from the second batch, indicate that the survey is a reasonable description of the scheduling practises among U.K. industries.