Python Intelligent Scheduling Code

[danielpybus]

Hello everyone, very glad to have found this forum!

I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction with a work project. When I google this kind of stuff, I see really complicated answers from very skilled developers that I can't understand because I'm a beginner.

I need to develop an intelligent scheduling program for work. I'll provide a bit of background with an example. We have 100 orders booked onto 50 different machines over the next four weeks (operations on machines can take anything from an hour to 100 hours). But then a priority order comes in and needs to be scheduled onto the machines (which already have jobs booked on). I need to develop something that will shuffle jobs around to accomodate the priority order with as little disruption to existing jobs as possible, working within our standard operation times of 6am - 8pm.

I'm not looking for the complete answer here. I just wondered if anyone could point me in the right direction of any resources eg websites, videos etc, that they have seen related to this kind of problem, so I can get a feel of how to get started. I'd really appreciate the advice!

Thanks everyone,
Danny

 

[ivan.moony]

I think you'd be best with one of database programming options:

1. The most powerful option: a general programming language + database. Oracle once had a free version of Java+SQL IDE, maybe it's still around. Microsoft Visual Studio with any of Basic or C# or ... + SQL also applies to this purpose (I think they also provide a free environment without the IDE). There is also MS Azure platform, but it seems like an overkill for your purpose. Maybe you can also get along with Python+Some-DB as a less mainstream, but simpler option (Python is pretty mainstream, but in combination with Some-DB, IMHO it may not be). In short, you pick a combination of the following two:
   • There are many alternatives for general programming languages. Picking the mainstream ones would be helpful due to availability of resources, especially for a beginner.
   • For databases, SQL is the mainstream, but many NoSQL-s are appearing in the last two decades. Also, It wouldn't hurt if you would take a peek at graph databases.
2. There are less serious, more simple (at the beginning), but also powerful GUI options like: "Access" from MS Office, or "Base" from free LibreOffice. They usually provide some form of general scripting too.
3. Various CASE tools. With these you do in days what you'd do in months using option (1). They should provide the simplest, automated database development, but they may be less general, which means that one day you might want to extend your application in a way that your version of CASE tool doesn't support. CASE tools may run in browsers too. They mainly charge a monthly subscription for a service of hosting and managing your database online.
4. My favorite - an online version of option (1): HTML + (PHP/ASP/Node.js/...) + (MySQL/...). There may be some automatizations like CMS-s to simplify things.

You could also go without databases, programming your own in-memory arrays (you may be lucky to find a cool library doing this), loading them from disk when your app starts and saving to disk when the app ends, but general databases do seem like more serious business.

 

[danielpybus]

Thanks Ivan.moony, thats very helpful advice. Thankfully, one of the modules I start this semester is focussed solely on databases