How to measure robustness of shunting plans

Abstract

The general problem of scheduling activities subject to temporal and resource constraints as well as a deadline emerges naturally in numerous application domains such as project management, production planning, and public transport. The schedules often have to be implemented in an uncertain environment, where disturbances cause deviations in the duration, release date or deadline of activities. Since these disruptions are not known in the planning phase, we must have schedules that are robust, i.e., capable of absorbing the disturbances without large deteriorations of the solution quality. Due to the complexity of computing the robustness of a schedule directly, many surrogate robustness measures have been proposed in literature. In this paper, we propose new robustness measures, and compare these and several existing measures with the results of a simulation study to determine which measures can be applied in practice to obtain good approximations of the true robustness of a schedule with deadlines. The experiments are performed on schedules generated for real-world scheduling problems at the shunting yards of the Dutch Railways (NS).