Blog
Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
Everything we have published.
The Total Assigned Hours Metric in Optimization
Total assigned hours is the workload a schedule commits across every operation. Here is how the EDGEBIC optimizer reports it and why it usually holds steady when you reorder.
The Working-Hour Timeline in Schedule Optimization
How the CP-SAT solver in EDGEBIC measures time: 36-second ticks on a compressed working-hour axis, with nights, weekends, and holidays squeezed out before it solves.
Weighted Versus Total Tardiness in Optimization
The EDGEBIC optimizer tracks two lateness measures. Total tardiness sums all late hours; weighted tardiness scales each job by priority so a critical job late counts for more.
What Happens When You Discard an Optimized Schedule
Discarding an optimizer proposal leaves your committed schedule byte-for-byte unchanged. Here is exactly what happens when you decline a plan in EDGEBIC.
Why the Optimizer Treats Due Dates as Soft Targets
The EDGEBIC optimizer models due dates as strongly weighted targets, not hard walls, so it always returns the best achievable plan even when some dates cannot be met.
Choosing the Optimizer Engine: Multi-Run or Solver
EDGEBIC ships two optimizer engines: a multi-run search and a mathematical solver. Here is how to choose in Options, what each badge means, and why switching is always safe.
How a Greedy Schedule Leaves Capacity on the Table
A greedy scheduler commits each job's whole routing before it looks at the next one. Here is exactly how that myopia idles a work center, and how optimization recovers it.
How the Multi-Run Optimizer Searches Schedules
The multi-run optimizer reruns the scheduling engine with many different job orderings, scores every complete plan, and keeps the best one. Here is exactly which orderings it tries.
How the Optimizer Locks Features It Does Not Model
When a job uses a feature the mathematical solver does not yet optimize natively, EDGEBIC locks it to the greedy plan exactly. Here is why that makes the solver safe for every dataset.
How the Optimizer Preserves Completed and Started Work
The optimizer never moves work that is already done. Completed rows pass through optimize and Accept byte-identical, using the same actuals-preservation machinery as any reschedule.
How the Optimizer Scores a Schedule
One calculator produces every optimizer number: weighted tardiness, late jobs, makespan, setup, and instability. Here is how EDGEBIC scores a plan so the comparison you read is the math it chose by.
Minimizing Weighted Tardiness With the Optimizer
Weighted tardiness is the optimizer's core delivery measure: total lateness scaled by job priority. Here is how it is computed, why it leads most goals, and how to read it.