Teaching scheduling approaches to graduate students.

Course Description

Decisions related to designing and scheduling of a production system play an important role in all manufacturing industries. Decisions like configuration of a layout, planning of material flow and scheduling of activities on resources, are all essential for maximizing the profit of a company. In this course, the students learn how to support these decisions by applying various quantitative methods in application areas such as assembly systems, process industries, automotive industry and AGVs in production centers. The course is split up into two parts, namely a design part and a scheduling part. In the design part, we identify different production systems and layouts like job shops, flow lines, single flow rows and production centers for which we introduce methods which are applied to numerous examples and practical problems. A general introduction to a collection of tools and techniques for lean production is also provided. In the second part of the class, we treat the scheduling of short term operations on the different types of systems we designed in the first part. We apply different quantitative scheduling approaches, which typically concern the allocation of limited resources to the activities that have to be done. Approaches covered include shifting bottleneck, scheduling of flexible assembly systems, economic lot scheduling, block planning and online vs. offline scheduling.

My Contribution

• Taught the scheduling part of this class
• Created the scheduling part of the exam