The incorporation of alternative operations in a scheduling system increases the utilization rate of resources and reduces the makespan of manufacturing products. A heuristic algorithm is developed for a scheduling problem with and without alternative operations. The effect of alternative operations on the performance of schedules generated are studied with five dispatching rules. The testing effort involves 240 scheduling problems obtained for randomly generated data. The computational results show that the most dissimilar resources (MDR) dispatching rule for the case with alternative operations performs best among the dispatching rules tested. The quality of schedules (makespan, utilization rate of resources) generated with any dispatching rule improves when alternative operations are used. >
['Jaekyoung Ahn', 'Weihua He', 'Andrew Kusiak']
Scheduling with alternative operations