Design and Development of Scheduling Systems on the Internet

Scheduling management, together with money management and quality management are the three main issues of logistics planning and control. Many different methods based on operations research and artificial intelligence have been developed and applied for scheduling problems. For the last two decades, interactive scheduling systems have become one of the most effective and efficient information support systems for real life, especially large-scale, logistic applications. Due to the advent of information technology, scheduling systems with interactive and configurable support on the Internet will be one of the innovative approaches to tackle sophisticated scheduling problems. The Internet scheduling systems can cooperate to exchange information, synchronize operations, and increase responsiveness. In this paper, we first describe the prototype interactive scheduling systems based on the object-oriented methodology. Then we propose the model of an Internet scheduling system. Based on client/server architecture, the Internet scheduling system is split into display oriented client and computation oriented server. From the modification of prototype interactive scheduling system, the scheduling system can easily fit into client/server architecture on the Internet. We also discuss the implementation issues with examples. We conclude that the Internet scheduling system can improve the flexibility and accessibility to tackle large-scale logistics scheduling applications.