Industrial scheduling solution based on flexible heuristics

- Alternative efficient heuristics for the solution of large-scale scheduling problems.
- Comparison between generic heuristics and MILP.
- Industrial standard ISA-95 and the main principles how to use it.
- System view of solving scheduling problems.
- Generic example problem that can be used for benchmarking.

This paper presents a generic heuristic-based scheduling solution. It highlights the flexibility that a simple heuristic method can offer and shows that using the ISA-95 standard it is possible to express the most relevant problem requirements. In order to illustrate the possible benefits, the paper also compares the solution quality of a smaller scale example scheduling problem to a rigorous mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach and shows how a heuristic approach scales towards large-size industrial problems. The paper concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, showing that for certain types of problems, the heuristic approach is fully sufficient, even if it cannot be expected to result in optimal solutions.