Cyclic job shop scheduling using reservation tables

The use of the reservation table technique to create optimal cyclic schedules is explored. A detailed discussion and analyses are presented of the properties that determine the theoretical maximum initiation rate, the set of all possible initiation strategies, efficient strategies that yield the maximum realizable performance, and the methods for adding delay to a reservation table so that its maximum realizable rate achieves the theoretical maximum rate. These methods inherently allow multiple devices to be reserved concurrently. They can deal with transport time explicitly. They achieve higher initiation rates by including cycles that involve multiple job initiations. The optimizations are fully valid, not heuristic. These scheduling algorithms can be coupled with the planning environment reported by J.K. Chaar and R.A. Volz (1989). The integrated planning/scheduling framework forms a major component of a software engineering environment that the authors are currently developing