Below is an overview of the available scheduling patterns. Patterns corresponding to (machine) environments are marked in orange and patterns corresponding to processing characteristics are marked in blue. The diagram is loosely following UML class diagram notation, so a white arrowhead describes a generalisation and a black diamond denotes a composition, so the pattern at the opposite end of the black diamond can not stand on its own.
A more detailed description of the patterns and links to the corresponding pattern description pages, which include modelling variants, can be found below.
Environments
The Job Shop Pattern occurs if a set of jobs is to be processed on a set of machines. Each job consists of a set of operations and the order of the operations as well as the machine on which the operation is to be processed are predetermined.
The Flexible Flow Shop Pattern occurs if a set of jobs is to be processed on a set of machines, which are partitioned into stages. The machines within a stage are identical. Further, each job is to be processed on each stage exactly once and in a predetermined order, which is the same for all jobs.
The Flow Shop Pattern occurs if a set of jobs is to be processed on a set of machines. Further, each job is to be processed on each machine exactly once and in a predetermined order, which is the same for all jobs.
Characteristics
The Machine Setup Pattern occurs if the machines in the Job Shop or Flow Shop Pattern machine environment need a certain amount of time to set up between operations consecutively processed on the same machine.
The Distinguishable Resources Pattern occurs if, when a number of operations are being processed, exactly one resource from a set of resources needs to be present for each of the operations and we need to distinguish between each resource.
The permutation pattern occurs if a number of jobs are processed on machines under the Flow Shop Pattern and the order in which jobs are processed on the machines is the same for all machines.
The No Wait Pattern occurs if a number of jobs are to be processed on a set of machines under the Job Shop Pattern or Flow Shop Pattern and jobs are not allowed to wait between operations.
The 1-Blocking Pattern occurs if a number of jobs are to be processed on a set of machines under the Flow Shop Pattern and there must at any time be at most one job queuing in front of a machine, in other words the buffer between any two machines has capacity 1
The n-Blocking Pattern is the extension of the 1-Blocking Pattern to larger Buffer capacities. The n-Blocking Pattern occurs if a number of jobs are to be processed on a set of machines and there must at any time be at most n jobs queuing in front of a machine, in other words the buffer in front of any machine has capacity n.
Domain-specific Constraint Patterns 