Scheduling problems with learning and ageing effects: a survey

Abstract

In recent years, many papers concerning scheduling problems with simultaneous learning and ageing effects were published. In this paper, the state of the art of research concerning these problems is presented. In order to facilitate understanding this subject, the scheduling problems where these effects occur separately, are firstly explained. Then, the papers devoted to scheduling problems combining the effects of learning and ageing are discussed. Particular attention was paid on practical applications of the considered scheduling problems. After thorough analysis it turned out that both scheduling problems with learning effect, and with ageing effect, as well as, in particular, the problems with models merging learning and ageing effects do not have any reasonable real-life applications. This is because the learning and ageing effects are in general long time horizon phenomena observed in repetitive systems and scheduling theory concerns either with repetitive short-horizon planning problems or single long-horizon projects. Therefore, there is no sense to continue research considering these scheduling problems from practical (computer engineering, automatic control, technical and economical) point of view, unless such reasonable real-life example appears.