IBM ILOG Scheduler User's Manual > Advanced Concepts > Using Transition Times and Costs

Using Transition Times and Costs

Closely related to transition times are transition costs. In Scheduler, a transition cost is defined on a unary resource between two consecutive activities as the cost to switch the resource from processing the first activity to processing the second. Such costs could include adjusting or purging a machine, and may require manpower, material, or energy, for example.

In addition, Scheduler allows you to define a setup cost for the activity that starts the usage of the resource and a teardown cost for the activity that ends the usage of the resource.

Transition costs are highly problem-dependent, so in Scheduler you can define your own transition costs with an instance of the class IloTransitionCost. This chapter shows you how to define the transition cost function you want. You can add as many transition costs as are needed on a unary resource.

Scheduler associates an integer transition type with each activity. The accessors are the functions IloActivity::getTransitionType and IloActivity::setTransitionType. Transition types are used to index integer tables (transition tables), which are instances of the class IloTransitionParam. With the transition tables you can define instances of the classes IloTransitionCost and IloTransitionTime.

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