The Scheduling Job-Set Optimization Problem: A Model-Based Diagnosis Approach

A common issue for companies is that the volume of product orders may at times exceed the production capacity. We formally introduce two novel problems dealing with the question which orders to discard or postpone in order to meet certain (timeliness) goals, and try to approach them by means of model-based diagnosis. In thorough analyses, we identify many similarities of the introduced problems to diagnosis problems, but also reveal crucial idiosyncracies and outline ways to handle or leverage them. Finally, a proof-of-concept evaluation on industrial-scale problem instances from a well-known scheduling benchmark suite demonstrates that one of the two formalized problems can be well attacked by out-of-the-box model-based diagnosis tools.