The MICRO-BOSS Scheduling System: Current Status and Future Efforts

1Over the past few years, several approaches to scheduling have been proposed that attempt to reduce tardiness and inventory costs by opportunistically (i.e. dynamically) combining resource-centered perspective to schedule bottleneck resources, and a job-centered perspective to schedule non-bottleneck operations on a job by job basis. Rather than relying on their initial bottleneck analysis, these schedulers reexamine the problem each time a resource or a job has been scheduled. This enables them to detect the emergence of new bottlenecks during the construction of the schedule. This ability has been termed opportunistic scheduling [3]. Nevertheless, the opportunism in these systems remained limited, as they required scheduling large resource-subproblems or large jobsubproblems before allowing for a change in the scheduling perspective (i.e. before permitting revision in the current scheduling strategy). For this reason, we actually refer to these approaches as macro-opportunistic techniques.