Flexible flow shop (or a hybrid flow shop) scheduling problem is an extension of classical flow shop scheduling problem. In a simple flow shop configuration, a job having ‘g’ operations is performed on ‘g’ operation centres (stages) with each stage having only one machine. If any stage contains more than one machine for providing alternate processing facility, then the problem...

In this paper we address a multi-objective scheduling problem for unrelated parallel machines. In unrelated parallel systems, the processing cost/time of a given job on different machines may vary. The objective of scheduling is to simultaneously determine the job-machine assignment and job sequencing on each machine. In such a way the total cost of the schedule is minimized. The cost function ...

This thesis presents new and improved scheduling algorithms for a number of scheduling problems. The first part of the thesis deals with two online-list scheduling problems, both with the objective to minimize the makespan. In these problems, the jobs arrive one by one and the decision maker has to irrevocably schedule the arriving job before the next job becomes known. In the second part, a ne...

In this paper, we provide a new class of randomized approximation algorithms for scheduling problems by directly interpreting solutions to so-called time-indexed LPs as probabilities. The most general model we consider is scheduling unrelated parallel machines with release dates (or even network scheduling) so as to minimize the average weighted completion time. The crucial idea for these multi...

We investigate cost-sharing mechanisms for scheduling cost-sharing games. We assume that the demand is general—that is, each player can be allocated one of several levels of service. We show how to design mechanisms for these games that are weakly group strategyproof, approximately budget-balanced, and approximately efficient, using approximation algorithms for the underlying scheduling problem...

The mainstream architecture of a parallel machine with more than tens of processors is a distributed-memory machine. The bulk synchronous task scheduling problem (BSSP, for short) is an task scheduling problem for distributed-memory machines. This paper shows that there does not exist a ρ-approximation algorithm to solve the optimization counterpart of BSSP for any ρ < 6 5 unless P = NP .

In the multi-operation scheduling that arises in industrial engineering, each job contains multiple tasks (operations) that require execution in different shops. It is assumed that in each shop there is only one machine to perform the required operations. In this paper, a parallel model of multi-operation scheduling is proposed, in which multiple machines are available in each shop to perform t...

Job scheduling has always been a challenging task in modern manufacturing and the most real life scheduling problems which involves multi-criteria and multi-machine environments. In this research our direction is largely motivated by the adoption of the Just-In-Time (JIT) philosophy in parallel machines system, where processing times of jobs are controllable. The goal of this paper is to minimi...