Machine scheduling, operations research, production, and machine learning. An anecdote thread for @sidwindc.

Biographical background: from age 15 to about 21, I spent my summers working for the laboratory equipment manufacturer that also employed my dad (in "construction").

After that I moved to prepoduction at Siemens, also for healthcare equipment, mostly coding production and tooling processes in CNC. This is where I stayed until my master's thesis.

I might be somewhere in this picture. https://twitter.com/oliverbeige/status/954670416320180224?s=20

For my master's thesis, and this is the topic of this thread, I moved to what is now Novartis in Basel into the scheduling group. This was both moving from a blue collar to a PhD level white collar environment and from the Bundesliga to the Champions League.

A chemical and pharmaceutical plant in a densely populated area along the Rhine river, and there are quite a few of them, is a zero tolerance environment. If something goes wrong, people die. If people die, scheduling carries the brunt of the blame.