The drying of sawn lumber is one of the major processing steps in sawmills with high production volumes. Existing publications on kiln drying analyse and improve technological conditions, while this paper focuses on the scheduling and loading planning with time availability of the individual dried packages. To improve dry kiln scheduling for multiple and identical kilns in large softwood processing sawmills, heuristic approaches are developed that generate kiln allocation plans according to existing production specifications. The aim is to minimise total tardiness for the drying of all sawn lumber packages while considering technological and capacity restrictions. These heuristics calculate the position, time and kiln for each package, thus solving scheduling and loading problems caused by capacity and stacking limitations. Several heuristic approaches are illustrated and tested with actual production data. In addition, the difference between static and dynamic scheduling for group and batch generation is analysed. Further improvements are possible through: drying of different lumber assortments in one batch, outsourcing the drying of special assortments or investing in supplementary kilns for drying smaller volumes within more flexible time slots.

锯材的干燥是高产量锯木厂的主要加工步骤之一。现有的有关窑干燥的出版物分析并改善了技术条件，而本文则着重于按时间安排和装载计划，以及各个干燥包装的时间可用性。为了改善大型软木加工锯木厂中多个相同窑的干窑调度，开发了启发式方法，可根据现有生产规范生成窑分配计划。目的是在考虑技术和容量限制的同时，将所有锯材包装的干燥总拖延降至最低。这些试探法计算出每个包装的位置，时间和窑炉，从而解决了因容量和堆垛限制而导致的调度和装载问题。说明了几种启发式方法，并使用实际生产数据进行了测试。此外，还分析了用于组和批次生成的静态和动态调度之间的差异。可以通过以下方式进一步改善：将一批不同的木材干燥，将特殊品种的干燥外包，或投资购买辅助窑以在更灵活的时隙内干燥较小的木材。