Operator non-availability periods

In scheduling literature, the notion of machine non-availability periods is well known, for instance for maintenance. In our case of planning chemical experiments, we have special periods (the week-ends, holidays, vacations) where the chemists are not available. However, human intervention by the chemists is required to handle the starting and termination of the experiments. This gives rise to a new type of scheduling problems, namely problems of finding schedules that respect the operator non-availability periods. These problems are analyzed on a single machine with the makespan as criterion. Properties are described and performance ratios are given for list scheduling algorithms.