A heuristic for the multi-period petrol station replenishment problem

In the multi-period petrol station replenishment problem (MPSRP) the aim is to optimize the delivery of several petroleum products to a set of petrol stations over a given planning horizon. One must determine, for each day of the planning horizon, how much of each product should be delivered to each station, how to load these products into vehicle compartments, and how to plan vehicle routes. The objective is to maximize the total profit equal to the revenue, minus the sum of routing costs and of regular and overtime costs. This article describes a heuristic for the MPSRP. It contains a route construction and truck loading procedures, a route packing procedure, and two procedures enabling the anticipation or the postponement of deliveries. The heuristic was extensively tested on randomly generated data and compared to a previously published algorithm. Computational results confirm the efficiency of the proposed methodology.     

Managing uncertainty in call centres using Poisson mixtures

We model a call centre as a queueing model with Poisson arrivals having an unknown varying arrival rate. We show how to compute prediction intervals for the arrival rate, and use the Erlang formula for the waiting time to compute the consequences for the occupancy level of the call centre. We compare it to the current practice of using a point estimate of the arrival rate (assumed constant) as forecast. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Skilled workforce scheduling in Service Centres

The Skilled Workforce Project Scheduling Problem (SWPSP) is a complex problem of task scheduling and resource assignment that comes up in the daily management of many company Service Centres (SC). The SWPSP considers many real characteristics faced daily by the SC: client-company service quality agreements that establish maximum dates for the beginning and the end of tasks with penalties for delays, criticality levels indicating the client-priority in processing each task, generalized precedence relationships that can produce cycle structures, time period and percentage time lags and variable task durations depending on the worker executing the task. Furthermore, the SC workforce is made up of specialist workers characterised by efficiency levels showing their efficiency and speed executing the several types of tasks. Each worker has his or her own timetable.     

限位排序的若干结果

In this paper,we first consider the position restriction scheduling problems on a single machine.The problems have been solved in certain special cases,especially for those obtained by restricting the processing time pj=1.We introduce the bipartite matching algorithm to provide some polynomial-time algorithms to solve them.Then we further consider a problem on unrelated processors.     

Learning and forgetting effects on a group scheduling problem

This paper proposes to investigate learning and forgetting effects on the problem of scheduling families of jobs on a single machine to minimize total completion time of jobs. A setup time is incurred whenever the single machine transfers job processing from a family to another family. To analyze the impact of learning and forgetting on this group scheduling problem, we structure three basic models and make some comparisons through computational experiments. The three models, including no forgetting, total forgetting and partial forgetting, assume that the processing time of a job is dependent on its position in a schedule. Some scheduling rules and a lower bound are derived in order to constitute our branch-and-bound algorithm for searching an optimal sequence. In addition, an efficient and simply-structured heuristic is also built to find a near-optimal schedule.     

已知工件最大加工时间的平行机排序问题

研究了已知工件最大加工时间，目标为极小化最大机器负载的半在线平行机排序问题．证明了对于一般的m（〉6）台机器，任意的半在线算法的竞争比至少是（√33＋3）／6．同时还设计了一个半在线算法，算法的竞争比为2-1／（m-1）．     

多车场有时间窗的多车型车辆调度及其禁忌算法研究

本文针对物流配送中的多车场车辆调度问题提出了两种多车场的处理方法，介绍了多车场车辆调度问题中容量、时间窗、多车型等多种约束的处理方法，并且根据具体约束情况设计了禁忌算法，对多车场有时间窗的多车型车辆调度问题加以实现，给出了一个具有代表性的算例试验结果和结果分析，通过试验表明了此方法对优化有时间窗的多车型车辆调度问题的有效性．     

一种新的两道工序柔性流水车间排序问题

本文针对F_2(p),h11.1|m_1=1,m_2=μ≥2|C_(max)这一问题给出了几种近似算法,并对每种近似算法进行了最坏情形分析,给出了最坏情形界.     

A two pass heuristic algorithm for scheduling ‘blocked out’ units in continuous process industry

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling cascaded ‘blocked out’ continuous processing units separated by finite capacity storage tanks. The raw materials for the product lines arrive simultaneously on the input side of the first unit. But every unit can process only one product line at a time, thus giving rise to the possibility of spillage of raw material due to limited storage capacity. The need to process multiple product lines and the added constraint of multiple intermediate upliftment dates aggravate the problem. This problem is quite common in petrochemical industry. The paper provides a MINLP (Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming) formulation of the problem. However, for any realistic scheduling horizon, the size of the problem is too large to be solved by standard packages. We have proposed a depth first branch and bound algorithm, guided by heuristics, to help planners in tackling the problem. The suggested algorithm could output near optimal solutions for scheduling horizons of 30 time periods when applied to real life situations involving 3 units and 3 product lines. Preliminary version of the paper appeared in the proceedings of MISTA, 2005.     

A general model for cyclic machine scheduling problems

A general framework for modeling and solving cyclic scheduling problems is presented. The objective is to minimize the cycle time. The model covers different cyclic versions of the job-shop problem found in the literature, robotic cell problems, the single hoist scheduling problem and tool transportation between the machines.It is shown that all these problems can be formulated as mixed integer linear programs which have a common structure. Small instances are solved with CPLEX. For larger instances tabu search procedures have been developed. The main ideas of these methods are indicated.