ROSP Topic: Scheduling

Scheduling problems are known to be very difficult problems in many industries. They are a source of potential gain for companies and a challenge for researchers.

We are interested in specific scheduling problems such as:

• Management of additional resources (use of robots or wire-guided trolleys to move parts, or operators at the beginning or the end of production)

• Management of unavailability of machines (maintenance) or additional resources. For these scheduling problems, we try to prove the optimality of open conjectures.

• High multiplicity problems i.e. problems given in a compact manner where tasks are aggregated by categories. In this case, it can be a challenge to establish the complexity of a problem (in particular to show that the problem is NP hard).

• Dealing with uncertainty on data, which is a critical aspect of health care systems. More precisely, we focus on optimizing flows in medical sterilization systems in collaboration with the team GCSP.

• Scheduling in a cross docking framework. Cross docking is a logistical technique which aim at avoiding the storage of products (which is quite an expensive operation). On a cross docking platform, between suppliers and customers, goods are separated and grouped together according to their destination, in order to serve customers as soon as possible, most of the time in less than 24 hours.