Scheduling under resources and temporal constraints

Scheduling is a decision making process that is used on a regular basis in many manufacturing and service industries. It plays an important role in optimizing the use of available resources in order to satisfy one or several objectives. The problem of scheduling jobs on machines is usually discussed under the assumptions of known and constant processing times and continuously available machines. However, in practice, the scheduler might have to deal with various special forms of constraints: machines may be subject to preventive maintenance, jobs might wait until a machine resets itself, processing times may increase as the machines get older, etc.