Increasing product complexity, manufacturing environment complexity and an increased emphasis on product quality are all factors leading to uncertainties in production processes. These uncertainties are in the form of unplanned machine maintenance, varying production yields and rework, among...

This paper details the application of a class of heuristics to the Fixed-life Perishability Problem formulated by Nahmias (1975a) and Fries (1975). Various assumptions for this model include i.i.d. demand, linear ordering, holding and penalty costs. Goods have a known fixed lifetime and perished...

We examine the problem of scheduling a given set of jobs on a single machine to minimize total early and tardy costs. Two dispatch priority rules are proposed and tested for this NP-complete problem. These were found to perform far better than known heuristics that ignored early costs. For...

Although Horn, Sidney and Lawler have considered the problem of minimizing weighted mean flow time for n jobs with precedence constraints on one machine, practical exact algorithms for the general case remain elusive. Two relatively sophisticated heuristics are presented which are...

Modelling planning problems that extend over many time periods as linear programs leads to a special structure called a "staircase" or "dynamic" linear program. In this special structure, the nonzero coefficients of the linear program appear in blocks along the "main diagonal" of the coefficient...

The accelerated pace of technological change has led to rapid obsolescence of productive capacity in electronics and other industries. Managers must consider the impact of future technologies while making acquisition and replacement decisions in such environments. We consider a problem where a...