Scheduling of Two Agents Task Chains with a Central Selection Mechanism

In this paper we address a deterministic scheduling problem in which two agents compete for the usage of a single machine. Each agent decides on a fixed order to submit its tasks to an external coordination subject, who sequences them according to a known priority rule. We consider the problem from different perspectives. First, we … Read more

Scheduling on uniform nonsimultaneous parallel machines

We consider the problem of scheduling on uniform processors with nonsimultaneous machine available times with the purpose of mini\-mi\-zing the maximum completion time. We give a variant of the Multifit algorithm which generates schedules which end within $1.382$ times the optimal maximum completion times. This results from properties of the Multifit algorithm when used for … Read more

A Strong Preemptive Relaxation for Weighted Tardiness and Earliness/Tardiness Problems on Unrelated Parallel Machines

Research on due date oriented objectives in the parallel machine environment is at best scarce compared to objectives such as minimizing the makespan or the completion time related performance measures. Moreover, almost all existing work in this area is focused on the identical parallel machine environment. In this study, we leverage on our previous work … Read more

Acceleration and Stabilization Techniques for Column Generation Applied to Capacitated Resource Management Problems

This research presents a very efficient method of solving a broad class of large-scale capacitated resource management problems by introducing a new formulation and decomposition. A heuristic called Likelihood of Assignment is utilized not only to find high quality initial integer feasible solutions, but also to guide the Branch-and-Price (B&P) Algorithm towards stabilization. Although Column … Read more

Solving the High School Timetabling Problem to optimality by using ILS algorithms

The high school timetabling is a classical problem and has many combinatorial variations. It is NP-Complete and since the use of exact methods for this problem is restricted, heuristics are usually employed. This paper applies three Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithms which includes two newly proposed neighborhood operators to heuristically solve a benchmark of the … Read more

A big bucket time indexed formulation for nonpreemptive single machine scheduling problems

A big bucket time indexed mixed integer linear programming formulation for nonpreemptive single machine scheduling problems is presented in which the length of each period can be as large as the processing time of the shortest job. The model generalises the classical time indexed model to one in which at most two jobs can be … Read more

Decentralised Shared Resource Constraint Scheduling with Confidentiality Protection

As resources become scarce and expensive, it has become increasingly important for players in a decentralised supply chain to collaborate. One of the main challenges in collaboration is to find close to globally optimal solutions without sharing individual player’s private data. Taking a decentralised resource constrained scheduling problem as an example we present a methodology … Read more

A two-step optimization approach for job shop scheduling problem using a genetic algorithm

This paper presents a two-step optimization approach to solve the complex scheduling problem in a job shop environment. This problem is also known as the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP). The JSSP is a difficult problem in combinatorial optimization for which extensive investigation has been devoted to the development of efficient algorithms. The proposed approach … Read more

Simulation Optimization for the Stochastic Economic Lot Scheduling Problem with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times

We consider the stochastic economic lot scheduling problem (SELSP) with lost sales and random demand, where switching between products is subject to sequence-dependent setup times. We propose a solution based on simulation optimization using an iterative two-step procedure which combines global policy search with local search heuristics for the traveling salesman sequencing subproblem. To optimize … Read more

Improving the Performance of Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming

This paper is concerned with tuning the Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming algorithm to make it more computationally efficient. We report the results of some computational experiments on a large-scale hydrothermal scheduling model developed for Brazil. We find that the best improvements in computation time are obtained from an implementation that increases the number of scenarios … Read more