Adequate production planning and detailed scheduling is one of the major challenges in modern production systems. This is due to the fact that on the one hand a large number of constraints (capacity restrictions, availability of resources and materials, precedence constraints,...) has to be considered. On the other hand, the simultaneous optimization of different criteria (minimization of tardiness, earliness, processing time,…) is an essential aspect. Moreover, often several thousand production orders have to be assigned to a multitude of materials and machines. Therefore, the size of the planning task is a critical issue as well.

ITWM SchedulerLab is a platform that has been designed to develop and evaluate well adapted algorithms for production planning and detailed scheduling in a fast and cost-efficient way. The platform supports:

• a smooth integration of production planning and detailed scheduling algorithms in existing IT-infrastructures via XML interfaces,
• the development and evaluation of novel concepts of user interaction to improve decision support,
• the utilization of state-of-the-art optimization algorithms to achieve high performance,
• the development and practical implementation of efficient optimization algorithms to achieve maximum performance,
• the consideration of different evaluation criteria at the same time,
• the benchmarking of custom-designed production planning and detailed scheduling problems.

Using ITWM SchedulerLab, new production planning and detailed scheduling algorithms can be developed and evaluated on the basis of operative data, without changing an existing real-time operating system.