Disturbances and their impact on scheduling

Various disturbances may upset batch production schedules during execution, necessitating frequent corrections. These disturbances have a negative impact on the performance of batch process operations. The goal of our research is to improve this performance by providing production schedulers with a disturbances management system. This system helps schedulers to find a better schedule, to find it quicker and to adjust it adequately to disturbances during its execution. The functions of the system supporting scheduling initialisation and adjustment result in, amongst others, more robust schedules. To achieve this, we introduce a performance indicator and an effectuation indicator indicating the quality of the operation and the effectuation of the planned operation, respectively.