What Is a Scheduling Mode? Definition and the Five Modes

A scheduling mode is the scope a single scheduling run applies: which orders it touches and which it leaves alone. One mode schedules only new, unscheduled jobs; another clears everything and replans the whole plant from scratch; others reschedule future work while preserving what is in progress or imminent. The mode is the single biggest control over how much the plan changes when you run it, and choosing the wrong one is the difference between a gentle add-on and an unwanted full rebuild.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC glossary; see the manufacturing glossary for the wider vocabulary and the frozen window definition for the near-term preservation two of these modes rely on.

How Scheduling Modes Work

Every time you generate a schedule, the engine has to decide what to do with the plan that already exists. Should it start clean, or build on what is there? Should it leave running jobs alone, or reconsider everything? The scheduling mode answers that question by defining the run's scope: the set of orders it will reschedule and the set it will preserve.

That scope decision matters more than any single algorithm choice, because it determines how much of the plan moves. A narrow scope adds new work without disturbing anything; a wide scope replans the plant. The same orders, the same capacity, and the same routings can produce a stable plan or a completely reshuffled one depending only on the mode.

Two of the modes lean on a near-term freeze: they preserve jobs that are in progress or about to start, and replan only what lies beyond. That is how a routine refresh improves the future without breaking the present. For the mechanism behind that preservation, see the frozen window.

The Five Modes

• Add-only. Schedules only orders that have no existing schedule and does not touch anything already planned. The routine run for dropping newly entered jobs into open capacity without disturbing the plan.
• Full reschedule. Clears all existing schedules and allocations and replans every order from scratch. The clean rebuild for after major routing, capacity, or shift-calendar changes: plan the whole plant fresh.
• Reschedule-all. Replans every order not yet started, plus new orders, while preserving completed and in-progress jobs. A mid-day re-optimization of future work that does not touch the shop floor.
• Production-safe refresh. Preserves jobs starting inside the near-term window and all in-progress jobs, then reschedules everything else. The supervisor's plan for the next few hours stays put while the rest re-optimizes.
• Reschedule-existing. Replans current orders only, without adding new ones. A capacity re-check without pulling in newly released jobs.

Each is a different balance of freshness against stability. Add-only and the production-safe refresh favor stability; full reschedule favors a clean, optimized plan at the cost of moving everything.

There Is No Mode Picker

An important practical point: you do not choose a mode from a dropdown labeled with these five names. There is no mode picker. The scope of a run comes from how you launch it: whether you selected specific job rows before scheduling, and the confirmation dialog you respond to when you start the run. The five modes are the engine's internal behaviors that those choices map onto.

So a planner works in terms of intent, not mode names. You select the new jobs and confirm, and the engine applies add-only scheduling. You choose to replan everything and confirm, and it applies the full reschedule. The modes are the vocabulary for what the engine does under the hood; the interface is the selection and the confirm. Understanding the modes helps you predict what a given launch will do, which is the point of naming them at all.

The reason this matters is that the most common scheduling surprise is a run that changed more than the planner expected. Someone means to add a few orders, launches a run that scopes to the whole plant, and watches the afternoon reshuffle. Knowing the five modes is the antidote: once you can name what a given launch does, you stop being surprised by it. The modes are not busywork terminology; they are the mental model that lets you launch a run and know in advance exactly how much of the plan will move.

A Concrete Example

A planner adds three new orders in the morning and wants them scheduled without touching the existing plan. They scope the run to the new work and confirm; the engine applies add-only scheduling, placing the three orders in open capacity while every previously scheduled job stays exactly where it was. The existing plan does not move.

That afternoon, engineering pushes routing changes that affect most jobs, and new shift calendars go live. Now a gentle add-on is wrong: the existing plan carries stale assumptions. The planner runs a full reschedule, which clears every schedule and replans from scratch against the new routings and shifts. Everything moves, deliberately, because that is what a plant-wide change requires. Same planner, same plant, two runs, two very different scopes: the mode is what separated them.

How EDGEBIC Chooses a Mode

In EDGEBIC, the mode is determined at the moment you generate a schedule, through your row selection and the confirmation dialog, not through a named setting. The result is that most planners never think in mode names day to day; they think "add the new orders" or "replan everything," and the engine translates. Knowing the five behaviors, though, lets you predict exactly how much a run will change and avoid the classic surprise of a full reschedule reshuffling work you meant to leave alone.

For a deeper walk through each mode and when to use it, see the scheduling modes overview. For the stability side (choosing modes that keep the near term settled), see keeping schedules stable week to week. The site-wide defaults that sit above any single run are covered in the scheduling policy definition, and the foundational idea of generating a plan at all in what is production scheduling.

A scheduling mode is the scope you give a run. Match it to your intent (add, refresh, or rebuild) and the plan changes exactly as much as you meant it to, and no more.