Abstract: By using the theory of constraints,realtime scheduling is conducted for a painting workstation,the bottleneck in an automotive maintenance plant.By taking machine environment,processing characteristics,and operation constraints into account,a mathematical model is developed with minimizing the tardiness as objective.Based on the model and due to the complexity of the problem,a heuristic is presented by combining composite dynamic dispatching rules.A case problem is used to verify the application of the proposed method.Numerical results show that it is computationally efficient and good schedules can be obtained.