Production Scheduling on Practical Problems

Management ́s desire to be more competitive and to increase profits through manufacturing is evident. Customer responsiveness, increased output, lower manufacturing costs, better quality, short cycle times, bottleneck control and operational predictability, among many other themes, are hot issues on manager ́s minds. The management of manufacturing processes is a complex problem that ́s objective is to sell goods and services to the marketplace, through internal production resources and supplier agreements and capabilities. It is therefore advisable to structure the solution of the problem hierarchically, considering different aggregation levels of information and decisions, Figure 1.