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Overview

Where planning answers “what should we produce and when,” scheduling answers “who does what, on which machine, in what order.” ProDex’s scheduling optimizer produces a detailed job-level timeline — every job assigned to a specific resource with precise start and end times. Scheduling accounts for real-world complexity: changeover times between job types, resource downtime, precedence constraints from your bill of materials, and available inventory.

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Setting Up a Schedule

A Scheduling Config is your problem definition template. Like the Planning Model, you configure it once and reuse it across multiple scheduling runs.

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Processes

Define the discrete job types in your scheduling problem. Each process specifies:
  • The entity type it operates on
  • Processing time (fixed or distribution-based)
  • Which resources it requires and how many

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Resources

The machines, lines, or labor pools jobs run on. Each resource has:
  • Capacity (how many jobs can run simultaneously)
  • An availability calendar (when the resource is up)
  • Changeover rules — setup times required when switching between job types
The changeover matrix defines the time cost of switching from one job type to another on a given resource. This is critical in environments with meaningful setup times (e.g., cleaning between product types, tooling changes).

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BOM Graph

The bill of materials drives precedence constraints: if product A requires component B, then the job producing B must complete before the job producing A can start. ProDex reads this automatically from your BOM configuration.

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Inventory On-Hand

Current stock of intermediate and raw materials. The scheduler accounts for what’s already available so it doesn’t unnecessarily schedule production of components you already have.

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Downtime Calendar

Planned unavailability for resources — maintenance windows, shifts, holidays. Jobs cannot be scheduled during resource downtime.

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Running the Scheduler

Once your config is set, define your production targets (which SKUs to produce, in what quantities) and click Optimize. The scheduler solves the assignment problem and returns a full production timeline.

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Reviewing the Schedule

Results are displayed as a Gantt-style timeline showing each job’s assigned resource and timing. You can see:
  • Job start and end times
  • Resource assignments
  • Changeover gaps between jobs
  • Any unfulfilled jobs (if capacity is insufficient)

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KPIs

  • Makespan — total duration from first job start to last job end
  • Solver status — optimal, feasible, or infeasible
  • Objective value — the cost the scheduler minimized
  • Optimality gap — proximity to the theoretical best solution
  • Computation time

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Making Manual Adjustments

If the optimizer’s schedule doesn’t match operational realities, you can edit it manually. ProDex stores both the optimized schedule and any manual version you create, so you can always reference what the optimizer suggested.

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Comparing Scenarios

Run the scheduler multiple times with different inputs — different downtime calendars, resource capacities, or production targets — and compare the resulting schedules. This is useful for evaluating the impact of adding a resource, changing a shift pattern, or adjusting the product mix.