Title: A framework for dynamic dispatch decision-making applied in transportation scheduling

Authors: Sundaravalli Narayanaswami; Narayan Rangaraj

Addresses: Higher Colleges of Technology, P.B. No. 58855, Madinat Zayed, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates ' Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 056, Maharashtra, India

Abstract: Scheduling is the process of resource allocation to task demands; a schedule includes resource allocation times to specific tasks and sequences in which tasks are processed by resources to obtain certain performance objectives. Heuristic and computational means are employed to develop schedules. When a planned schedule gets disrupted, the same schedule and dispatch sequence may not still provide the intended objective. In this paper, we present a novel method for deciding dispatch sequence of disrupted tasks pertaining to job shop scheduling problems. Our approach is based on simple computations on dynamic system parameters at the disrupt instance. We describe our dispatch decision-making process and validate performance of our procedure in achieving the intended objective. We verify applicability of our method to real-life problems as in railway rescheduling. Performance evaluations with other comparable procedures, managerial insights and problem characteristics where our framework is employable are reported.

Keywords: transport scheduling; disruption; job shop scheduling; single machine scheduling; heuristic ranking; dispatch decision making; railway rescheduling; railways.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2012.050151

International Journal of Operational Research, 2012 Vol.15 No.4, pp.448 - 465

Published online: 11 Jan 2015 *

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