Algorithms for parallel machine scheduling: a case study of the tracking and data relay satellite system

This paper presents two algorithms for scheduling a set of jobs with multiple priorities on non-homogeneous, parallel machines. The application of interest involves the tracking and data relay satellite system run by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This system acts as a relay platform for Earth-orbiting vehicles that wish to communicate periodically with ground stations. The problem is introduced and then compared to other more common scheduling and routing problems. Next, a mixed-integer linear programming formulation is given but was found to be too difficult to solve for instances of realistic size. This led to the development of a dynamic programming-like heuristic and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure. Each is described in some detail and then compared using data from a typical busy day scenario.     

基于约束满足问题的中继卫星调度问题研究

中继卫星任务规划与调度是中继卫星系统应用中的重要问题。根据航天器的空间轨道参数，得到中继卫星与用户航天器之间的可见时间窗口。在此基础上，通过分析中继卫星系统中各种资源之间的约束关系、任务优先级与调度准则，建立中继卫星系统的任务调度模型。仿真结果表明，基于约束规划理论建立中继卫星调度模型是解决中继卫星调度问题的有效方法。     

Multi-parallel work centers scheduling optimization with shared or dedicated resources in low-volume low-variety production systems

A new methodology for modeling large-scale scheduling problems in low-volume low-variety production systems is proposed through this paper. Such scheduling problems are constrained by limited time and resources, where each work center is assigned a unique statement of work, to be completed on-time with the budgeted number of resources. Products assembled in low-volume low-variety production systems are processed through a series of stations referred to as work centers, where varying levels and classifications of resources are deployed onto the product. Aircraft, heavy aero-structures, and heavy military equipment are examples of products assembled in low-volume low-variety production systems. To ensure products are delivered on-time and on-budget, it is crucial to execute to a detailed schedule, such that all precedence, resource, zonal, and other constraints and characteristics inherent in such production systems are successfully satisfied. Despite the criticality of detailed schedules in delivering products on-time and on-budget, limited research is reported on mixed-integer programming approaches for scheduling optimization of activities in low-volume low-variety production systems. The discrete-time linear mixed-integer mathematical programming model developed in this paper fills the gap in the current literature with a direct impact on the organizations’ service levels and bottom line. The proposed mathematical programming models are validated through a real-world case-study of the assembly process of a narrow body aircraft to ensure compatibility in the modeling of large-scale industrial problems.     

共享单车调度优化问题研究

针对共享单车站点经常出现的供需不平衡问题,提出人工调度策略,以提高单车利用率和用户满足率.首先将一天划分为几个用车高峰时段,根据每个站点的单车使用历史数据,计算各站点在每个时段的需求量区间;在区域内单车总投放量不变的前提下,基于每个时段初期各个站点存放的单车数量,确定单车调出站点和单车调入站点,进一步以站点之间的单车调度数量为决策变量,建立共享单车调度问题的整数规划模型,使区域内各个单车站点的供需量基本达到平衡,并且总调度成本最小.利用北京市海淀区共享单车数据进行模拟计算,对比分析了调度优化前后的共享单车利用率和用户满足率.结果显示,调度优化后,单车利用率平均提高7.78%,用户满足率平均提高13.09%;综合考虑企业调度成本和收入情况可以发现,通过调度优化,企业的平均利润增长率为7.53%.本文的研究结果可以帮助共享单车企业提升管理水平,增加利润.     

The next generation of UK military satellite communication systems

UK military satellite communications systems are currently provided by the Skynet programme. The current generation is collectively known as Skynet 4, and is due to be replaced from 2003 by the next generation. CDA has been asked to conduct an operational research study to review the potential communications requirements of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in the period 2003–2013, and assess what contribution could be made to them by the proposed future military satellite communications system. This paper discusses some of the political and technical issues surrounding the work carried out. Technically, the study looked at the dynamic loading of five different satellite options in three scenarios set in 2010. Each combination of scenario and satellite was modelled, and the results produced in terms of the chosen measures of effectiveness. The sensitivity of these results to various assumptions was tested to determine the robustness of the results. The scenarios included land, air and maritime operations. In an area where little or no analysis had previously been attempted (at least in the military context) in the UK, this ‘intervention’ succeeded in clarifying the main issues, and setting a course for future work.     

A note on scheduling problems arising in satellite communications

We present a brief overview of recent results on scheduling in Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) satellite communications systems which augment those included in a recent survey. These results address problems arising in Satellite Switched TDMA (SS/TDMA) systems and SS/TDMA systems with intersatellite links, as well as generalizations and relatives of these problems. They also have application in other areas, for example, I/O in parallel computers.     

Equipment scheduling problem under disruptions in mail processing and distribution centres

This paper addresses the production and workforce scheduling problem under disruptions in United States Postal Service mail processing facilities. These facilities contain a large variety of equipment and employ a non-homogeneous workforce that work on shifts of various lengths and start times. Disruptions such as demand fluctuation and absenteeism happen and may significantly change demand and the size of workforce. How to adjust production plans and workforce schedules through the use of overtime and flexible employees in the face of these disruptions to meet the service commitment is a challenging problem yet to be solved. This problem is modelled as a large-scale integer program, which contains equipment scheduling, shift scheduling and overtime management, and break assignment modules. Problems of realistic size are solved efficiently through an LP-based decomposition algorithm. Comprehensive experiments have been designed to investigate the effects of the use of overtime, the control of absenteeism, and the importance of integrating equipment and workforce scheduling simultaneously. The model integrates seamlessly with other research studies and provides the necessary and critical tools to manage the resources in a facility on a routine basis.     

An Experimental Investigation of Resource Allocation in Multiactivity Projects

This paper describes a computer-based experiment in the scheduling of multiactivity projects with limited resources. The main interest lay in a comparison of the traditional sorting criteria used to allot priority to activities competing for resources inadequate to satisfy all the demands and criteria newly defined for this work. One aim was to isolate, if possible, a criterion equally as good as the Critical Path parameters usually employed and yet easier to compute in practice. A similar experiment was carried out by Pascoe but none of the criteria used satisfied the second condition. It was also possible to monitor the effects on the scheduling of network parameters such as shape and connectivity.     

Scheduling with uncertainties on new computing platforms

New distributed computing platforms (grids) are based on interconnections of a large number of processing elements. A most important issue for their effective utilization is the optimal use of resources through proper task scheduling. It consists of allocating the tasks of a parallel program to processors on the platform and to determine at what time the tasks will start their execution. As data may be subject to uncertainties or disturbances, it is practically impossible to precisely predict the input parameters of the task scheduling problem.     

Stochastic-network Reduction and Sensitivity Techniques in a Cost Effectiveness Study of a Military Communications System

This paper describes some aspects of cost effectiveness methodology and operational research as they have been applied in a system design study for a military communications system. There are two main areas of interest from an operational research point of view:(a) The attempt to use cost effectiveness analysis as an integral part of system design.(b) The development and application of new techniques (notably in stochastic network analysis and simulation) which are potentially of much wider application.There are several ways of attacking the problem of multiple objectives encountered in a cost effectiveness analysis. These are briefly described and the preferred method of a single measure of effectiveness is discussed in detail. The measure used in the communications system design study is presented and the method of evaluating it by simulation is described. The next step after evaluation of the effectiveness is optimization and here the use of the Lagrange multipliers is introduced. This method requires iteration on the values of performance parameters and their costs and this becomes very time-consuming if a simulation must be performed each time. It is here that the novel methods of analysing networks are developed. The main use of these methods of analysis, or reduction rules, has been in reducing the size and complexity of the simulations. The technique which has contributed most to the reduction in the number of simulations required to arrive at an optimum disposition of resources is a method of carrying out a sensitivity analysis based on data collected during a single simulation run. This hybrid analytical-cum-simulation technique is discussed in detail with reference to a communications system, and its application to a wider range of problems, such as probabilistic PERT, indicated.     

含多抽水蓄能电站的电网多目标运行优化研究

广州抽水蓄能电站和惠州抽水蓄能电站开停机计划不够合理,导致两个蓄能电站不能实现均衡使用。针对此问题,提出在参照预测的日负荷曲线的基础上,利用加速变步长算法确定两个电站的调度方案,并运用回归分析预测法对每个电站的日抽水量进行预测。据此,可以合理安排两个蓄能电站的工作位置,避免机组的频繁启停,使其能够更好地发挥调峰填谷、调频、调压、提供备用等作用。     

Scheduling for single agile satellite,redundant targets problem using complex networks theory

Scheduling for the Earth observation satellites (EOSs) imaging mission is a complicated combinatorial optimization problem, especially for the agile EOSs (AEOSs). The increasing observation requirements and orbiting satellites have exacerbated the scheduling complexity in recent years. In this paper, the single agile satellite, redundant observation targets scheduling problem is studied. We introduce the theory of complex networks and find similarities between AEOS redundant targets scheduling problem and the node centrality ranking problem. Then we model this problem as a complex network, regarding each node as a possible observation opportunity, and define two factors, node importance factor and target importance factor, to describe the node/target importance. Based on the two factors, we propose a fast approximate scheduling algorithm (FASA) to obtain the effective scheduling results. Simulation results indicate the FASA is quite efficient and with broad suitability. Our work is helpful in the EOSs and AEOSs scheduling problems by using complex network knowledge.     

Literature review on multi-appointment scheduling problems in hospitals

This paper presents a review of the literature on multi-appointment scheduling problems in hospitals. In these problems, patients need to sequentially visit multiple resource types in a hospital setting so they can receive treatment or be diagnosed. Therefore, each patient is assigned a specific path over a subset of the considered resources and each step needs to be scheduled. The main aim of these problems is to let each patient visit the resources in his or her subset within the allotted time to receive timely care. This is important because a delayed diagnosis or treatment may result in adverse health effects. Additionally, with multi-appointment scheduling, hospitals have the opportunity to augment patient satisfaction, allowing the patient to visit the hospital less frequently. To structure the growing body of literature in this field and aid researchers in the field, a classification scheme is proposed and used to classify the scientific work on multi-appointment scheduling in hospitals published before the end of 2017. The results show that multi-appointment scheduling problems are becoming increasingly popular. In fact, multi-appointment scheduling problems in hospitals are currently gaining progressively more momentum in the academic literature.     

A fuzzy clustering application to precise orbit determination

In recent years, fuzzy logic techniques have been successfully applied in geodesy problems, in particular to GPS. The aim of this work is to test a fuzzy-logic method with an enhanced probability function as a tool to provide a reliable criteria for weighting scheme for satellite-laser-ranging (SLR) station observations, seeking to optimize their contribution to the precise orbit determination (POD) problem. The data regarding the stations were provided by the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS), NASA/Crustal Dynamics Data Information System (CDDIS) provided the satellite data for testing the method. The software for processing the data is GEODYN II provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Factors to be considered in the fuzzy-logic clustering are: the total number of LAGEOS passes during the past 12 months, the stability measure of short- and long-term biases, the percentage of LAGEOS normal points that were accepted in CSR weekly LAGEOS analysis, and the RMS uncertainty of the station coordinates. A fuzzy-logic statistical method allows classifying the stations through a clear ‘degree of belonging’ to each station group. This degree of belonging translates into a suitable weight to be assigned to each station in the global solution. The first tests carried out showed improvements in the RMS of the global POD solution as well as individual stations, to within a few millimeters. We expect further work would lead to further improvements.     

Cooperative metaheuristics for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem

In this work, we propose cooperative metaheuristic methods for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem considering two objectives separately: total tardiness and makespan. We use the island model where each island runs an instance of the algorithm and communications start when the islands have reached certain level of evolution, that is, communication is not allowed from the beginning of the execution. Subsequent ones occur when new better solutions are found. We carry out an exhaustive comparison of the cooperative methods against the sequential counterparts running in completely comparable scenarios. Results have been carefully analysed by means of statistical procedures and we can conclude that the cooperative methods yield much better results than the sequential algorithms and state-of-the-art methods running in the same number of processors but without communications. The proposed cooperative schemes are easy to apply to other algorithms and problems.     

Trading grid services – a multi-attribute combinatorial approach

The Grid is a promising technology for providing access to distributed high-end computational capabilities. Thus, computational tasks can be performed spontaneously by other resources in the Grid that are not under the user’s control. However, one of the key problems in the Grid is deciding which jobs are to be allocated to which resources at what time. In this context, the use of market mechanisms for scheduling and allocating Grid resources is a promising approach toward solving these problems. This paper proposes an auction mechanism for allocating and scheduling computer resources such as processors or storage space which have multiple quality attributes. The mechanism is evaluated according to its economic and computational performance as well as its practical applicability by means of a simulation.     

The FCFS service discipline: Stable network topologies, bounds on traffic burstiness and delay, and control by regulators

We consider the well-known First Come First Serve (FCFS) scheduling policy under bursty arrivals. This policy is commonly used in scheduling communication networks and manufacturing systems. Recently it has been shown that the FCFS policy can be unstable for some nonacyclic network topologies.We identify some network topologies under which FCFS is stable for all arrival and service rate vectors within the system's capacity. This is done by determining a sharp bound on the burstiness of traffic exiting from a tandem section of the system, in terms of the burstiness of the incoming traffic. This burstiness bound further allows us to provide a bound on the maximum number of parts in the system, and the maximum delay. It also enables us to analyze the performance of some systems controlled by the use of traffic smoothing regulators. The maximum delay can remain bounded even in the heavy traffic limit, when all stations are 100% utilized.     

动态空间调度的混合遗传算法

提出了一种基于混合遗传算法的动态空间调度方法。首先利用遗传算法产生多个可行的分段调度序列,再采用动态决定分段位置的启发式算法——平均最大空闲矩形策略对遗传算法产生的调度序列进行解码。同时以完工时间和平台利用率的加权和作为适应度函数,充分考虑了空间调度问题所特有的动态性和时空关联性。遗传进化过程收敛后得到近似最优解,实现了调度方案的全局优化。对船厂实际生产数据进行了实证分析以及与其它算法的对比分析,证明了所提方法在空间调度问题上的有效性和实用性。     

Surgical case scheduling as a generalized job shop scheduling problem

Surgical case scheduling allocates hospital resources to individual surgical cases and decides on the time to perform the surgeries. This task plays a decisive role in utilizing hospital resources efficiently while ensuring quality of care for patients. This paper proposes a new surgical case scheduling approach which uses a novel extension of the Job Shop scheduling problem called multi-mode blocking job shop (MMBJS). It formulates the MMBJS as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem and discusses the use of the MMBJS model for scheduling elective and add-on cases. The model is illustrated by a detailed example, and preliminary computational experiments with the CPLEX solver on practical-sized instances are reported.     

Optimal control of polling models for transportation applications

We formulate and analyze a dynamic scheduling problem for a class of transportation systems in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework. A transportation system is represented by a polling model consisting of a number of stations and a server with switch-over costs and constraints on its movement (the model we have analyzed is intended to emulate key features of an elevator system). Customers request service in order to be transported by the server from various arrival stations to a common destination station. The objective is to minimize a cost criterion that incorporates waiting costs at the arrival stations. Two versions of the basic problem are considered and structural properties of the optimal policy in each case are derived. It is shown that optimal scheduling policies are characterized by switching functions dependent on state information consisting of queue lengths formed at the arrival stations.