In this paper we present data concerning the accuracy of firm's forecasts of engineering employment and suggest a simple model that may be of use in improving their accuracy. The results, which pertain to 54 firms in the aerospace, electronics, chemical, and oil industries, should be of use to...

This paper describes a methodology based on decision analysis for addressing major program decisions in the development of magnetic fusion energy. The development of this complex technology involves a sequence of funding choices over time among multiple technical approaches and under...

This paper defines a model that covers the multimachine extensions of all existing flow-shop problems with time lags as well as flow-shop problems where setup, processing and release times are separated. Approximate solutions and lower completion time bounds are developed for the restricted and...

This paper is concerned with the problem of scheduling tasks on a system consisting of two parallel processors in order that makespan be minimized. In particular, we treat a variety of modifications to this basic theme, including the cases of identical, proportional, and unrelated processors. In...

We develop a production planning model in the context of a system of assembly lines or production lines. The model is a large-scale linear program and we provide a polynomial column generation technique for its efficient solution. The column generation technique and the approach therein are also...

Component lot-splitting considerations, in which the lot-size of a component item may cover only a fraction of its parent item's lot-size, have been ignored in the literature when determining lot-sizes of items in multi-stage manufacturing systems. In this paper, a multi-stage lot-sizing problem...

The proportionate flowshop is a special class of flowshops in which the operation times of jobs are proportionate, e.g., because of differences in the speeds of machines. In this paper, we make use of a special property of proportionate flowshops, namely that the bottleneck in the shop is almost...

This paper addresses the problem of n jobs to be scheduled on a single machine in such a way that flow time variation is minimized. When the measure of variation is total absolute difference of completion times (TADC) the problem is shown to be quite simple. Sufficient conditions are shown for...

This paper describes new algorithms for estimating the transient performance of generalized flowlines in which completed products undergo test and rework until quality standards are met. The recursion approach is extended to incorporate features found in actual systems including (a) small-lot...