In many real world scheduling problems there exist hard deadlines after which tasks can no longer be performed. Conversely, not all tasks are necessarily required to be scheduled. Furthermore, the problem investigated in this thesis includes sequence dependent setup times, an aspect reminiscent of the Travelling Salesperson problem. These elements are the underlying additions of the Order Acceptance and Scheduling with Sequence Dependent Setup Times, and introduce additional difficulties to the problem of scheduling. Given the complexity of this problem, it is surprising no evaluation of black-box approaches has been performed. This thesis investigates the applicability, strengths and weaknesses of black-box optimization approaches to various instances of this problem. Two hints were provided in order to improve performance initially. The Time hint informs the approaches of the completion time of the last order in the evaluated schedule, while the Bounds hint leaks information about the release time and deadlines of each order. Both have notable up- and downsides with regards to performance. For the identified weaknesses improvements to the most promising approach, Permutation GOMEA, are proposed and evaluated. These improvements include the addition of various local search approaches, including one derived from an exact approach. The most notable result is a new approach based of GOMEA, named qGOMEA, which shows performance beyond that of any of the evaluated algorithms, including the current state-of-the-art of the Order Acceptance and Scheduling problem. Furthermore, applicability to other permutation problems was shown by improved performance on benchmark functions.

West IT Solutions is expanding into a new focus area, ”Smart Planning”. They want to develop new modules for the Enterprise Resource Planning software they resell, Odoo. Odoo allows companies to manage their projects, employees and other resources. The goal of this project was to create a software product that assists users in creating plannings for their projects in Odoo. The product should offer the following features: Visualise a planning for the user’s projects, Facilitate manually adapting the planning and Propose an automatically generated improvement of the planning. During the research phase of the project we met with a client of West, TNO. TNO explained they are performing research for the Dutch navy to create software that assists planners in creating schedules for battleships. With this case problem in mind, we created a list of requirements our software product should adhere to. We discovered that the case problem West provided us with is a subset of the case problem TNO provided. This meant that if we created a model for the case problem of TNO, the model would work for the case problem of West as well. After the research phase was completed, we started development on the software product. The development phase consisted of seven weeks, and in each week new functionalities were added to the product. In addition to adding new functionalities, we also kept refining our models to improve the performance of the automatic planning generation. The final software product consists of an interface that visualises a planning, a model that can be entered into external algorithms to automatically generate plannings and a module that allows users to import existing projects from Odoo. The user can view their planning through a visualisation that allows them to modify it using a drag and drop interaction. These modifications are setting preferences, like starting times for activities or the assignment of certain persons to certain activities. Once the user has set their preferences, they can ask the software to find an optimised planning that keeps their
preferences in mind. At the end of the project, we gave a demo to TNO and they were impressed with the results of the project. West IT was also happy with the delivered product and is interested in further developing it