REPORT SURVEY SCHEDULING SOFTWARE* 1 Pieter Caluwaerts, Wim De Bruyn, Luiza Gabriel, Bert Van Vreckem University College Ghent – Hogeschool GENT. GENT BELGIUM Pieter.Caluwaerts@hogent.be , Wim.Debruyn@hogent.be , Luiza.Gabriel@hogent.be , Bert.VanVreckem@hogent.be Introduction This survey deals with typical features of a scheduling software. In order to gain a general overview on the scheduling software market the study was sent to 72 manufacturers of scheduling software using an online survey tool called ‘Thesistools’. Due to changes in businesses of the respondents, no available time, etc. 26 vendors answered during a period between June and September 2009. Only 16 of them completed the survey and were useful for this research. Although the low number of responses gives doubts about the statistic significance, this study can give a first impression on what is available on the market and how far the product evolved. Furthermore, the topics discussed in the questionnaire can be an interesting first approach to improve different possibilities of the software and moreover for customers to look at different topics to be investigated when considering buying a scheduling tool. The complete survey can always be requested to the authors. Technical features Optimisation engine used by the scheduler The most popular optimisation engine appears to be non-analytical. Around half of the schedulers also provide in manual input engines (whether or not with constraint checking). 62,5% of the software uses a hybrid engine which is a combination of analytical en non-analytical algorithms. Consequently, 12,5% and 18,8% provide only analytical and non-analytical algorithms respectively (whether or not with manual input). Analytical tools, like linear programming, demand lots of calculation effort and are thus seldom the only optimisation engine. 1 This survey report is written within the PWO Project: Production scheduling of batch processes