Job Shop Scheduling - Shop, Purchase, Buy Online

The "Job-Shop Problem" (job shop scheduling) is a linear algebra optimization problem that is particularly applicable to the real-life situation of industrial manufacturers, especially job shops. The problem looks to, well, I'll let Mark Lee of the University of Alberta do the talking:

"Many jobs in industry and elsewhere require completing a collection of tasks while satisfying temporal and resource constraints. Temporal constraints say that some tasks have to be finished before others can be started; resource constraints say that two tasks requiring the same resource cannot be done simultaneously (e.g., the same machine cannot do two tasks at once). The objective is to create a schedule specifying when each task is to begin and what resources it will use that satisfies all the constraints while taking as little overall time as possible. This is the job-shop scheduling problem."

As could probably be surmised, going through the Job-Shop problem by hand everytime a new order is given to a job shop would become needlessly wearing and tedious. So, to help job shops everywhere, there are several computer programs available that will quickly and easily solve the Job-Shop problem for any given variables to allow for convenient and fast job shop scheduling.

Source: wikipedia.org, cs.ualberta.ca