Browsing by Subject "Machine scheduling"
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Item Open Access Customer order scheduling on a single machine with family setup times: complexity and algorithms(Elsevier, 2007) Erel, E.; Ghosh, J. B.We consider a situation where C customers each order various quantities (possibly zero in some cases) of products from P different families, which can be produced on a continuously available machine in any sequence (requiring a setup whenever production switches from one family to another). We assume that the time needed for a setup depends only on the family to be produced immediately after it, and we follow the item availability model (which implies that all units are ready for dispatch as soon as they are produced). However, an order is shipped only when all units required by a customer are ready. The time from the start (time zero) to the completion of a customer order is called the order lead time. The problem, which restates the original description of the customer order scheduling problem, entails finding a production schedule that will minimize the total order lead time. While this problem has received some attention in the literature, its complexity status has remained vexingly open. In this note, we show for the first time that the problem is strongly NP-hard. We proceed to give dynamic programming based exact solution algorithms for the general problem and a special case (where C is fixed). These algorithms allow us to solve small instances of the problem and understand the problem complexity more fully. In particular, the solution of the special case shows that the problem is solvable in polynomial time when C is fixed.Item Open Access Scheduling to minimize the coefficient of variation(Elsevier, 1996) De, P.; Ghosh, J. B.; Wells, C. E.In this paper, we address the problem of uninterruptedly scheduling a set of independent jobs that are ready at time zero with the objective of minimizing the coefficient of variation (CV) of their completion times. We first show that, for high processing time values of the longest job, a variance (V) minimizing schedule also minimizes CV. Using this equivalence, we next demonstrate the invalidity of an earlier conjecture about the structure of a CV-optimal schedule and proceed to establish the NP-hardness of the CV problem. Finally, drawing from our prior work on the V problem, we provide a pseudo-polynomial dynamic programming algorithm for the solution of the CV problem.