Comparison of Scheduling Strategies via a Statistical Analysis in an Industrial Context

This paper deals with multicriteria decision-making applied to discrete-continuous scheduling problems. The need to quickly generate good compromises between conflicting objectives requires the implementation of fast multicriteria scheduling strategies based on simulation and optimization methods. The purpose of this paper is to compare the solutions of five scheduling strategies so as to select the most adequate strategy when considering the decision-maker's preferences. The solutions are ranked via a lexicographical sort or a multicriteria analysis and validated by standard non-parametric statistical tests. This study synthesizes the results of the application of several scheduling strategies to a real-life, highly constrained industrial problem.