Scheduling with Team Production Effects

This paper introduces the new research field of team assignment and scheduling, taking into account the team production effect. In contrast to the opinions in job splitting literature, a given job's processing time is not simply its default processing time on one machine divided by the number of machines assigned to that job. Synergies may lead to other than linear relations between the number of assigned machines and the resulting processing times. After combining team production and scheduling theory in general, we focus on two common problem areas: minimizing the maximum completion time and the total tardiness. In the face of NP-hardness, we propose a specialized genetic algorithm which is general enough to tackle both problem areas. As a practical addition, both problems are modeled in spreadsheets and tackled with Excel's genetic algorithm add-in. Computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches