We consider the NP-hard problem of scheduling n jobs in m two-stage parallel flow shops so as to minimize the makespan. This problem decomposes into two subproblems: assigning the jobs to parallel flow shops; and scheduling the jobs assigned to the same flow shop by use of Johnson’s rule. For...

Schedulers confronted with significant processing time uncertainty often discover that a schedule which is optimal with respect to a deterministic or stochastic scheduling model yields quite poor performance when evaluated relative to the actual processing times. In these environments, the...

We consider the problem of integrating inventory control and vehicle routing into a cost-effective strategy for a distribution system consisting of one depot and many geographically dispersed retailers. All stock enters the system through the depot and is distributed to the retailers by vehicles...

This paper considers coordinated scheduling on parallel identical machines with batch delivery. Jobs are first processed on m parallel and identical machines in the manufacturing facility and then delivered to the customer in batches. There are v identical transporters that can carry up to c...

The classical objective function of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is to minimize the total distance traveled by all vehicles (Min–Sum). In several situations, such as disaster relief efforts, computer networks, and workload balance, the minimization of the longest route (Min–Max) is a...

Offshore petroleum industry uses helicopters to transport the employees to and from installations. Takeoff and landing represent a substantial part of the flight risks for passengers. In this paper, we propose and analyze approaches to create a safe flight schedule to perform pickup of employees...

The bipartite boolean quadratic programming problem (BBQP) is a generalization of the well studied boolean quadratic programming problem. The model has a variety of real life applications; however, empirical studies of the model are not available in the literature, except in a few isolated...

In current era, the trend of cloud computing is increasing with every passing day due to one of its dominant service i.e. Infrastructure as a service (IAAS), which virtualizes the hardware by creating multiple instances of VMs on single physical machine. Virtualizing the hardware leads to the...

This research effort presents a tabu search algorithm to solve the dynamic airlift loading problem. Given a set of palletized cargo items which require transportation from an aerial port of embarkation to an aerial port of debarkation within a pre-specified time frame, the dynamic airlift...