Despite the importance of the management of inventory in industrial scheduling applications, there has been little research that has addressed reasoning about inventory directly as part of a scheduling problem. In this paper, we represent inventory, inventory storage constraints, and inventory production and consumption in a constraint-directed scheduling framework. Inventory scheduling is then used to investigate heuristic commitment techniques based on the understanding and the exploitation of problem structure. A technique for the estimation of probability of breakage for resource and inventory constraints is presented together with a heuristic commitment technique based on the estimate of constraint criticality. It is empirically demonstrated that a heuristic commitment technique that exploits dynamic constraint criticality achieves superior overall performance.
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