Efficient Approach to Scheduling of High Throughput Screening Systems: A Case Study

Abstract

Nowadays, high throughput screening (HTS) systems are widely used in pharmaceutical industries and laboratories for discovery of new drugs and biomedical substances. It is important to efficiently schedule them so as to reduce the cost. In the operation of an HTS system, there are complex microplate flows and also time window constraints are imposed on some activities and activity sequences. Moreover, with the consistency requirement, a one-microplate cyclic schedule is necessary. Thus, its scheduling problem is very challenging, and the existing studies apply mathematical programming methods to tackle this problem. This paper studies the scheduling problem of an HTS system for an enzymatic assay, a typical application of HTSs, from the perspective of control theory. It is modeled by a Petri net model. With the model, a closed-from solution method is proposed to find a feasible and optimal cyclic schedule, which shows that polynomial algorithms for an optimal schedule exist.