Comparative study of time-based and activity-based production scheduling

Abstract

In this paper the principles behind the Time-based and Activity-based approaches to production scheduling are briefly explained. Based on a typical scheduling problem relating to chemicals processing sectors, two schedules using the two different approaches are generated for the purpose of comparison. The first schedule is generated using gBSS, which is a Time-based scheduling software package, which uses mathematical optimisation techniques. The second schedule is produced using BPS, which is a constraint-based scheduler following the principle of the Activity-based approach. A comparison is made between the two schedules considering three different aspects: (1) User input requirements to the problem (2) Quality of the schedule produced (3) Solution statistics. Interestingly, the two schedules produced by the two different approaches are slightly different, although both of them satisfied the product delivery requirements