topics

The book consists of three parts. The first part consists of three chapters that are all very introductory. The second part consists of the meat of the book. This part contains all the scheduling models. The third part focuses on implementation issues.

There are topics that are useful for seniors in Industrial engineering, Masters in Industrial Engineering and MBAs majoring in Operations Management. If an instructor would like to emphasize scheduling in manufacturing, then the most important topics for such a course (in my opinion) are:

• project scheduling (Ch 4)
• job shop scheduling (Ch 5)
• scheduling in flexible assembly systems (Ch 6)
• Lot sizing and scheduling (Ch 7)

If an instructor would like to emphasize scheduling in the service sector, then the more important topics (in my opinion) are:

• project scheduling (Ch 4)
• interval scheduling, reservation systems and timetabling (Ch 8)
• Workforce scheduling (Ch 9)

One suggestion that may be useful: Maybe in the beginning of a course an instructor would like to get into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP, e.g., SAP and Baan) and discuss how planning and scheduling systems are plugged into such information systems (a mixture of Chapters 1 and 10).

An instructor may want to contact Baan and SAP and ask them for material. Baan has a very nice CD called "Baan Synchronization" that is very useful for classroom demo's. Baan's website is: http://www.baan.com. SAP's website is: http://www.sap.com/products/apo.

If an instructor specifies in the syllabus that this topic is going to be covered more students may enroll.