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

Taiba Zahid, Mujtaba Hassan Agha, Salman Sagheer Warsi, Usman Ghafoor*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)145513-145521
Number of pages9
JournalIEEE Access
Volume9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Oct 2021
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • critical
  • fuzzy
  • heuristics
  • Project scheduling
  • responsive

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