Redefining Critical Tasks for Responsive and Resilient Scheduling-an Intelligent Fuzzy Heuristic Approach

Rapidly changing market has accentuated the need for developing robust and responsive schedules. Intelligent heuristics techniques have been widely used to provide scheduling alternatives for resource constrained scheduling and identify critical activities essential for monitoring and controlling these processes. We argue that traditional parameters based solely on slack calculation are insufficient to characterize tasks as critical and instead define a fuzzy parameter-based approach, which relies on process and task-specific information. Proposed parameter is used to rank activities on a scale based on their criticality to develop a heuristic. It was observed that the proposed intelligent heuristic performed better on well-known benchmark datasets in terms of both lead times and computation time. An improvement of 1.5-2.5 percent was observed in traditional performance measure of order lead times while for non-traditional criterion measuring robustness, improvement of 30-35 percent was observed. Furthermore, current research provides meaningful insight on critical tasks at the shop-floor.