| Abstract: | This article considers the problem of inserting arriving jobs into an existing schedule of a real world manufacturer. A number of match-up strategies, which collect the idle time on machines of a current schedule for the insertion of new jobs, are proposed. Their aim is to obtain new schedules with a good performance which are at the same time highly stable, meaning that they resemble as closely as possible the initial schedule. Basic rescheduling strategies such as ‘total rescheduling’, ‘right shift’ and ‘insertion in the end’ deliver either good performance or stability, but not both. Contrarily, our experimentation and statistical analysis reveal that the proposed match-up strategies deliver high performing schedules with a high stability. An analysis of the problem parameters that determine the behaviour of the proposed match-up algorithms is included in this article. |
