Responding quickly and efficiently to dynamic disturbances is a crucial challenge in domains such as manufacturing, aerial and underwater vehicle tasking, 16,18 and health care. In many cases, accurately capturing the complicated dependencies between tasks in these environments requires the use of upper and lowerbound temporal constraints (i.e, deadlines and wait constraints). However, optimall...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to explore the detrimental effects of working a varying pattern of 8-hour shifts on quality of sleep, general health and work performance. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The Arabic version of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI)and 2 self-administered questionnaires were used to assess quality of sleep, work performance and general health in a sample of 200 mal...

The work presented in this paper describes the explanation facility of an intelligent scheduling software framework that has been customized and deployed in a variety of domains. The customizability of the framework allows the software to develop a valid schedule that reflects each domain’s specific preferences and constraints. In all domains, the software quickly solves a complex scheduling pr...

This study was performed among coal miners in the remote location Svea, Spitsbergen. The shift schedule used to be 7 d on and 7 d off. The aim of this study was to investigate possible changes in health after a voluntary implementation of a new shift schedule, with periods of 14 d on and 14 d off, for 74 percent of the workers in 2007. A questionnaire was distributed to all employees before and...

Multi-cluster tools are widely adopted in wafer fabrication. It is of paramount importance to schedule them to achieve their optimal throughput. This work intends to find their one-wafer optimal periodic schedule to attain their lower bound cycle time. A resource-oriented Petri net model is developed to describe not only their steady state behavior but also behavior of their initial and final t...

Workforce scheduling problems are typical constraint satisfaction problems in which different constraints must be fulfilled, like needed workforce per day, forbidden sequences of shifts, length of work and days-off blocks etc. There are two main variants of workforce schedules: rotating (or cyclic) workforce schedules and non-cyclic workforce schedules. In a rotating workforce schedule all empl...

This research statement describes work in progress to enhance the performance of the Ground Processing Scheduling System (GPSS). The GPSS is a constraintbased scheduler that, using an anytime algorithm, deals with three kinds of constraints: temporal, resource, and configuration. It starts with a complete schedule that may have some constraint violations (conflicts) and gradually improves the s...