An Effective Approach for Job-Shop Scheduling with Uncertain Processing Requirements

Production systems often involve various uncertainties such as unpredictable customer orders or inaccurate estimate of processing times. Managing such uncertainties is becoming critical in the era of "time-based competition." For example, if a schedule is generated without considering possible orders in the future, new orders of significant urgency may interrupt those already scheduled, causing serious violation of their promised delivery dates. The consideration of uncertainties, however, has been proven to be very difficult because of the combinatorial nature of discrete optimization compounded further by the presence of uncertain factors