Interactive Excel-Based Gantt Chart Schedule Builder

Many scheduling dispatching rules are intuitive and processes which people utilize in every day life. As an example, when faced with a variety of tasks due at different times one often implements the earliest due date scheduling rule: the next task worked on is the one with the earliest due date. Other common scheduling dispatching rules have the nice property of being easy to understand, thereby enabling the ability to devise the rule by oneself when given the opportunity to experiment via trial and error. This paper presents an interactive Excel based Gantt Chart Schedule builder which enables students to experiment with building schedules for different single and parallel machine problem instances. Instead of explicitly telling students these common scheduling rules, the schedule builder enables students to discover the rules on their own. Herein, we describe the functionality of the schedule builder, assess its effectiveness via the student perception metric, and provide supplemental teaching materials enabling the use of the schedule builder in a wide variety of classroom environments.