Realistic Rescheduling: Is It Achievable?

Predictive scheduling methodologies are aimed at addressing the generation of production agendas, while assuming that all activities and resources are given and there is no uncertainty in their behavior. However, experience demonstrates that there are intrinsically uncertain parameters and that industrial environments frequently face unexpected events that force schedulers to update agendas over time. After a brief review of the main proposals that have been developed to address the problem of uncertainty in production environments, the reasons why academic approaches are not implemented in practice are discussed. Then, an online scheduling framework is presented. It considers scheduling as an ongoing process in which evolving and changing circumstances continually force reconsideration and revision of pre-established plans with the goal of balancing stability and efficiency. Such framework is by no means complete and offers a roadmap of challenges and opportunities for future work.