Clinical Chemistry, Vol 41, 1004-1010, Copyright © 1995 by American Association for Clinical Chemistry

Flexible protocols improve parallel experimentation throughput

RJ Aarts, JS Lindsey, LA Corkan and SF Smith
VTT Biotechnology and Food Research, Espoo, Finland.

Advanced chemical workstations offer the potential to substantially improve the productivity of experimental research. To fully exploit such technologies, effective scheduling of experiments is crucial. Chemists tend to define experimental protocols with rigid time constraints, although often the scientific objectives can be achieved without adhering to such constraints. Investigation of a scheduling algorithm that allows flexible time constraints shows that improvements in workstation throughput as great as 50% can be reached by modest flexibility in the timing of operations in the experiments. Several heuristics that might be used with the scheduling algorithm were tested; a heuristic that schedules long experiments while first keeping the workstation busy was shown to be a good general choice.