A simple algorithm is developed for the problem of assigning days off to full-time staff given a cyclic seven-day demand pattern. The formulation assumes that employees are entitled to two consecutive days off each week and that the objective is to find a minimum staff size capable of meeting...

Recent research studies of job shop scheduling have begun to examine the interaction between sequencing priorities and the method of assigning due-dates. This paper surveys the tactical aspects of this interaction, focusing primarily on average tardiness as a measure of scheduling effectiveness....

We consider the situation of a single item having a deterministic, time-varying demand pattern. Production lot sizes, so as to minimize the total of setup and carrying costs, are to be determined subject to production capacity restrictions that can vary with time. Two important theorems...

We develop and test an optimization model for maximizing response rates for online marketing research survey panels. The model consists of (1) a decision tree predictive model that classifies panelists into "states" and forecasts the response rate for panelists in each state and (2) a linear...

We examine the problem of scheduling days off in continuous (seven-day-a-week) operations under a variety of day-off policies, when demand for manpower is N on weekdays and n on weekend days. We consider a number of policies governing employee work assignments and in each case we give a formula...

Based on theoretical arguments and empirical evidence we advocate the use of the lognormal distribution as a model for activity times. However, raw data on activity times are often subject to rounding and to the Parkinson effect. We address those factors in our statistical tests by using a...

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...

A rolling schedule is formed by solving a multi-period problem and implementing only the first period's decisions; one period later the multi-period model is updated and the process repeated. In this paper, we provide a general framework for analyzing rolling schedules, and we examine...