The machining of high precision metal parts is of great importance to Canada. This activity supports other high-tech industries such as the aeronautics sector. Although this activity makes use of very complex technological equipment (which is expensive to operate), the management of production activities (e.g. planning and scheduling of production) rarely involves the use of algorithms that could in fact optimize productivity.

Due to the lack of appropriate software tools, decisions are made manually resulting in a suboptimal use of resources. Although this seems to be a classic job shop scheduling problem, classical approaches do not apply well in this specific context.