Efficient approach to cyclic scheduling of high throughput screening systems for bioengineering

Abstract

As a standard technology, high throughput screening (HTS) is widely applied for the analysis and detection of new biological substances and drugs in pharmaceutical industries and life science research. Efficient scheduling of HTS systems is a crucial issue for reducing the cost of their operations. As a typical application of high throughput screening, this work studies the scheduling problem of the enzyme-linked immunoassay (ELISA) processes in HTS systems. For this process, it requires a one-microplate cyclic schedule and a microplate visits some processing resources multiple times, making the process deadlock-prone such that its scheduling problem is very challenging. To tackle this problem, the process is modeled by a kind of Petri nets. Based on this model, by analyzing the dynamic properties of the process, it is able to directly deduce an activity sequence to form an optimal cyclic schedule. In this way, it not only efficiently solves the challenging scheduling problem without building a mathematical programming model, but also the obtained schedule is very easy to understand and implement.