Scheduling orders on either dedicated or flexible machines in parallel to minimize total weighted completion time

We are interested in the problem of scheduling orders for different product types in a facility with a number of machines in parallel. Each order asks for certain amounts of various different product types which can be produced concurrently. Each product type can be produced on a subset of the machines. Two extreme cases of machine environments are of interest. In the first case, each product type can be produced on one and only one machine which is dedicated to that product type. In the second case, all machines are identical and flexible; each product type can be produced by any one of the machines. Moreover, when a machine in this case switches over from one product type to another, no setup is required. Each order has a release date and a weight. Preemptions are not allowed. The objective is minimizing the total weighted completion time of the orders. Even when all orders are available at time 0, both types of machine environments have been shown to be NP-hard for any fixed number (≥2) of machines. This paper focuses on the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for these two machine environments. We also present empirical comparisons of the various algorithms. The conclusions from the empirical analyses provide insights into the trade-offs with regard to solution quality, speed, and memory space. Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation through grants DMI-0300156 and DMI-0245603.     

Scheduling networks of queues: Heavy traffic analysis of a simple open network

We consider a queueing network with two single-server stations and two types of customers. Customers of type A require service only at station 1 and customers of type B require service first at station 1 and then at station 2. Each server has a different general service time distribution, and each customer type has a different general interarrival time distribution. The problem is to find a dynamic sequencing policy at station 1 that minimizes the long-run average expected number of customers in the system.The scheduling problem is approximated by a dynamic control problem involving Brownian motion. A reformulation of this control problem is solved, and the solution is interpreted in terms of the queueing system in order to obtain an effective sequencing policy. Also, a pathwise lower bound (for any sequencing policy) is obtained for the total number of customers in the network. We show via simulation that the relative difference between the performance of the proposed policy and the pathwise lower bound becomes small as the load on the network is increased toward the heavy traffic limit.     

A rehabilitation training system with double-CCD camera and automatic spatial positioning technique

This study aimed to develop a computer game for machine vision integrated rehabilitation training system. The main function of the system is to allow users to conduct hand grasp-and-place movement through machine vision integration. Images are captured by a double-CCD camera, and then positioned on a large screen. After defining the right, left, upper, and lower boundaries of the captured images, an automatic spatial positioning technique is employed to obtain their correlation functions, and lookup tables are defined for cameras. This system can provide rehabilitation courses and games that allow users to exercise grasp-and-place movements, in order to improve their upper limb movement control, trigger trunk control, and balance training.     

A discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the multi-objective flexible job-shop scheduling problem with maintenance activities

This paper presents a novel discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm for solving the multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem with maintenance activities. Performance criteria considered are the maximum completion time so called makespan, the total workload of machines and the workload of the critical machine. Unlike the original ABC algorithm, the proposed DABC algorithm presents a unique solution representation where a food source is represented by two discrete vectors and tabu search (TS) is applied to each food source to generate neighboring food sources for the employed bees, onlooker bees, and scout bees. An efficient initialization scheme is introduced to construct the initial population with a certain level of quality and diversity. A self-adaptive strategy is adopted to enable the DABC algorithm with learning ability for producing neighboring solutions in different promising regions whereas an external Pareto archive set is designed to record the non-dominated solutions found so far. Furthermore, a novel decoding method is also presented to tackle maintenance activities in schedules generated. The proposed DABC algorithm is tested on a set of the well-known benchmark instances from the existing literature. Through a detailed analysis of experimental results, the highly effective and efficient performance of the proposed DABC algorithm is shown against the best performing algorithms from the literature.     

On the complexity of project scheduling to minimize exposed time

We consider project scheduling where the project manager’s objective is to minimize the time from when an adversary discovers the project until the completion of the project. We analyze the complexity of the problem identifying both polynomially solvable and NP-hard versions of the problem. The complexity of the problem is seen to be dependent on the nature of renewable resource constraints, precedence constraints, and the ability to crash activities in the project.     

Optimized appointment scheduling

In service systems, in order to balance the server’s idle times and the customers’ waiting times, one may fix the arrival times of the customers beforehand in an appointment schedule. We propose a procedure for determining appointment schedules in such a D/G/1-type of system by sequentially minimizing the per-customer expected loss. Our approach provides schedules for any convex loss function; for the practically relevant cases of the quadratic and absolute value loss functions appealing closed-form results are derived. Importantly, our approach does not impose any conditions on the service time distribution; it is even allowed that the customers’ service times have different distributions.     

大规模伤亡事件应对流程的前摄性调度优化

以死亡人数最少化为目标,研究大规模伤亡事件应对流程的前摄性调度优化问题。首先,使用伤情等级和伤情随机转化的马尔可夫链,建立伤员死亡概率与伤员处置时间的函数关系。随后,将研究问题转化为柔性作业车间静态调度问题,并设计遗传算法求解。最后用一个随机算例对算法进行仿真,结果表明：该算法可行有效;与现有研究中救援时间最短化的调度方法相比,伴随着可接受的救援时间跨度增加,该方法可大幅降低救援过程中的死亡人数。本文研究有助于决策者优化应急救援过程,有效减少死亡人员数量。     

转包且具有不同费用时间段的排序问题

本文研究制造商可以将工件转包给承包商加工的排序模型,承包商仅有一台机器,转包费用由分配给转包工件的不同时间段费用确定.本文分别研究制造商有一台单机及两台自由作业机器环境情形,需要确定被转包工件集及全部工件的加工顺序,使得工件最大完工时间与转包费用和最小.本文利用归约方法对制造商每个机器环境,证明问题NP困难性,并提出动态规划算法.     

The off-line group seat reservation problem

In this paper we address the problem of assigning seats in a train for a group of people traveling together. We consider two variants of the problem. One is a special case of two-dimensional knapsack where we consider the train as having fixed size and the objective is to maximize the utilization of the seats in the train. The second is a special case of two-dimensional bin packing where all requests must be accommodated while trying to minimize the number of passenger cars needed. For both variants of the problem we present a number of bounds and develop exact algorithms. Computational results are presented for various instances based on realistic data, and from the packing literature adapted to the problems addressed.     

Minimizing the number of machines for minimum length schedules

In this paper, we present a new objective function for scheduling on parallel machines: minimizing the number of machines for schedules of minimum length. We study its complexity and we prove the NP-completeness of this problem, even if there is no precedences or for unitary execution times. We propose several polynomial algorithms for various particular cases.