Event-driven production scheduling in SME

One common problem among Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) is to don’t have at disposal formal and simple approaches for production scheduling, especially in case of an event that introduces the requirement of a re-planning. The paper approaches this kind of event-driven re-scheduling problems at the arrival of a new order, when some jobs are under processing, some operation have already finished and other jobs are waiting to be loaded on a machine. For a simple application in a SME, to the operations already started and completed for a job a processing time equal to zero is assigned; the operations already started but not yet completed are interrupted and considered as operations that must be executed for the remaining part of their processing time; all the other jobs are considered for the event-driven job-shop re-scheduling problem. A validation of the procedure in a realistic application is presented.