Efficient Production Scheduling by Exploiting Repetitive Product Configurations

We consider the problem of scheduling production jobs on a single machine with sequence dependent family setup times and individual job deadlines. Given a set of jobs, the goal is to minimize the total time to process all jobs while every job meets its deadline. We study algorithms that compute an exact solution to the problem. Motivated by one example use case, we exploit a natural structural observation that occurs in many production settings: the number of product configurations may be significantly smaller than the total number of jobs. We identify an algorithm that is efficient in this setting in terms of performance. We experimentally evaluate its running time and compare it with two other natural approaches of exact job scheduling.