Review by

Sravan Patchala. Feel free to contact him at sravps7@gmail.com

Review

This is easily one of the most difficult courses you’ll come across in this department. As the name suggests, the course deals with scheduling (and/or sequencing) of multiple “jobs” on multiple “machines” in order to meet certain objectives. More specifically, the course deals with a variety of algorithms that achieve these objectives.

The first half of the course goes at a decent pace, with considerable time spent on definitions and measures of performance. The second half goes at a quicker pace, covering topics each of which are sourced from different research papers. This is what makes the course difficult. Although the course does not have any prerequisites, it is highly recommended that this course is taken after doing IE501. The instructor takes great effort to teach concepts from scratch, but it might be difficult to digest the vast content without having some prior exposure.

The lectures are a mix of solving examples, revising previous concepts as well as teaching new concepts. The instructor regularly calls students to the board to solve certain problems. So it is always good to be present physically (and mentally) in the class. The exams are on the tougher side, with the entire class scoring less than 50/100 overall, despite of the exams being open book. Given that, grading is lenient (Long live relative grading :P).

So if all that has intimidated you, then let me say that doing well in this course is easy, provided you are willing to struggle a day or two before the exams. The instructor reads through each and every answer written in the exams, and tries his best to give marks wherever due. Thus it is not as difficult as it sounds to get decent marks in the exams.