# SchedulingProblem¶

The SchedulingProblem class is the container for all modeling objects, such as tasks, resources and constraints.

## Time slots as integers¶

A SchedulingProblem instance holds a time interval: the lower bound of this interval (the initial time) is always 0, the upper bound (the final time) can be set by passing the horizon attribute to the __init__() method:

my_problem = SchedulingProblem('MySchedulingProblem', horizon=20)


The time interval is divided into a finite number of periods. Each period has a duration of 1. If $$horizon$$ is the horizon, then the number of periods is $$horizon$$ as well, and the number of points in the interval $$[0;horizon]$$ is $$horizon+1$$.

Warning

ProcessScheduler handles variables represented by integer values.

A period is the finest granularity level that describes the time line, the task durations, and the schedule itself. The time line is dimensionless. It is up to you to map one period to the desired duration, in seconds/minutes/hours. For example:

• you need to schedule a set of tasks in a single day, let’s say from 8 am to 6pm (office hours). The time interval is then 10 hours length. If you plan to schedule tasks with a granularity of 1 hour, then the horizon value will be 10 in order to get the desired number of periods:

$horizon = \frac{18-8}{1}=10$
• you need to schedule a set of tasks in the morning, from 8 am to 12. The time interval is 4 hours. If you plan to schedule tasks with a granularity of 1 minute, then the horizon must be 240:

$horizon = \frac{12-8}{1/60}=240$

Note

The horizon attribute is optional. If it is not passed to the __init__() method, the solver will search an horizon value compliant with the set of constraints. In the case where the scheduling problem aims at optimizing the horizon (e.g. a makespan objective), the horizon should not be set manually.

## Mapping integers to datetime objects¶

Because a Gantt chart if much more readable if real dates are represented instead of integers, it is possible to explicitly set the values in second, minutes, hours etc. The integer 1, i.e. the smallest time duration for a task, can be mapped to a timedelta python object. Any instant can be mapped to a datetime python object.

Python timedelta objects are created with python:

from datetime import timedelta
delta = timedelta(days=50,
seconds=27,
microseconds=10,
milliseconds=29000,
minutes=5,
hours=8,
weeks=2)


For datetime objects:

from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()


These attribute values can be passed to the SchedulingProblem initialization method:

problem = ps.SchedulingProblem('DateTimeBase',
horizon=7,
delta_time=timedelta(minutes=15),
start_time=datetime.now())


After the solver has completed the solution, the end times, start times and durations are exported either to the Gantt chart or any other output type.

Note

Users should refer to the datetime python package documentation.