We argue the importance of studying service systems in which the successful completion of job/customer service cannot be observed contemporaneously. Military and other applications are cited. The allocation of a large amount of processing to a job may make its (unobservable) successful...

A set of jobs, with stochastic processing times, is to be processed on a machine which is subject to breakdown and repair. The machine’s uptime is assumed to have a general phase type distribution, the processing time of each job and the repair times of the machine are generally considered as...

This paper presents a stochastic mixed integer programming approach to integrated supplier selection and customer order scheduling in the presence of supply chain disruption risks, for a single or dual sourcing strategy. The suppliers are assumed to be located in two different geographical...

Quite often transportation companies face two types of jobs, ones which they can plan themselves and ones which have to be done on call. In this paper we study the scheduling of these jobs, while we assume that job durations are known beforehand as well as windows in which the jobs need to be...

In this paper we apply a new framework for the study of monotonicity in queueing systems to stochastic scheduling models. This allows us a unified treatment of many different models, among which are multiple and single server models (with and without feedback), discrete and continuous time...

In this paper we deal with the time complexity of single- and identical parallel-machine scheduling problems in which the durations and precedence constraints of the activities are stochastic. The stochastic precedence constraints are given by GERT networks. First, we sketch the basic concepts...

This work deals with a scheduling problem of a real-world production process in the metal–working industry. The production process can be described as an offline stochastic flexible flow-shop problem with limited buffers. In a first step, we analyze a simplified model and develop a variable...

We investigate the stochastic flow shop problem with m machines and general distributions for processing times. No analytic method exists for solving this problem, so we looked instead at heuristic methods. We devised three constructive procedures with modest computational requirements, each...

We address the single-machine stochastic scheduling problem with an objective of minimizing total expected earliness and tardiness costs, assuming that processing times follow normal distributions and due dates are decisions. We develop a branch and bound algorithm to find optimal solutions to...

This paper addresses a scheduling problem with random processing time when the operating system is subject to stochastic failure. First, scheduling of a single job is reviewed and the expected cost rate is obtained. Single scheduling time and multiple scheduling times for one job are discussed...