Scheduling an event for a group of people is a notoriously frustrating task; it tends to be tedious, time consuming, and often leads to suboptimal schedules. One reason the problem has resisted a solution is that it has many dimensions, some of them easy to put one’s finger on, but others more subtle such as game-theoretic manipulability of the procedure. The first part of this work seeks algor...

Humans are social animals and usually organize activities in groups. However, they are often willing to split temporarily a bigger group in subgroups to enhance their preferences. In this work we present NightSplitter, an on-line tool that is able to plan movie and dinner activities for a group of users, possibly splitting them in subgroups to optimally satisfy their preferences. We first model...

In this research we address a sequence-dependent group scheduling problem on a set of unrelated-parallel machines where the run time of each job differs on different machines. To benefit both producer and customers we attempt to minimize a linear combination of total weighted completion time and total weighted tardiness. Since the problem is shown to be NP-hard, meta-heuristic algorithms based ...

This paper studies planning problems for a group of heating systems which supply the hot water demand for domestic use in houses. These systems (e.g. gas or electric boilers, heat pumps or microCHPs) use an external energy source to heat up water and store this hot water for supplying the domestic demands. The latter allows to some extent a decoupling of the heat production from the heat demand...

Event scheduling is a group decision-making process in which social dynamics influence people’s choices and the overall outcome. As a result, scheduling is not simply a matter of finding a mutually agreeable time, but a process that is shaped by social norms and values, which can highly vary between countries. To investigate the influence of national culture on people’s scheduling behavior we a...

The development of optimization models for planning and scheduling is one of the most useful tools for improving productivity of a large number of manufacturing companies. This paper presents a mixed-integer programming model for scheduling steelmaking-continuous casting production. We first review the recent works in continuous casting planning. We focus on a model inspired from an application...

This paper describes a simple scheduling procedure for use in multicast data distribution within a logistical networking infrastructure. The goal of our scheduler is to generate a distribution schedule that will exploit the best network paths by using historic network performance information. A ”spanning tree” is constructed between available logistical depots to help reduce the overall time of...

One of the major challenges of the current research in the eld of parallel computing is the development of a realistic underlying framework for the design and programming of general purpose parallel computers. The bulk-synchronous parallel (BSP) model is largely viewed as the most suitable candidate for this role, as it ooers support for both the design of scalable parallel architectures and th...

This paper considers the single machine scheduling problem with independent family (group) setup times where jobs in each family are processed together. A sequence independent setup is required to process a job from a different family. The objective is to minimize total tardiness. A mixed integer programming model capable of solving small sized problems is described. Several heuristic algorithm...