The first comprehensive survey paper on scheduling problems with separate setup times or costs was conducted by Allahverdi et al. (1999), who reviewed the literature since the mid-1960s. Since the appearance of that survey paper, there has been an increasing interest in scheduling problems with setup times (costs) with an average of more than 40 papers per year being added to the literature. The objective of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the scheduling literature on models with setup times (costs) from then to date covering more than 300 papers. Given that so many papers have appeared in a short time, there are cases where different researchers addressed the same problem independently, and sometimes by using even the same technique, e.g., genetic algorithm. Throughout the paper we identify such areas where independently developed techniques need to be compared. The paper classifies scheduling problems into those with batching and non-batching considerations, and with sequence-independent and sequence-dependent setup times. It further categorizes the literature according to shop environments, including single-machine, parallel machines, flow shop, no-wait flow shop, flexible flow shop, job shop, open shop, and others.

No abstract

Facing the growing concern of environmental impact, green service (GS) has emerged as an important research topic in production and operations management. However, empirical research on GS is hindered by the lack of theoretically developed and empirically validated measurement scales covering various practices in service operations of a supply chain. GS indicates the strategic orientation of firms in developing a combination of practices and routines to reduce environmental impact in service operations that span from product development to servicing customers. Grounded in the natural resource‐based view (NRBV), this study conceptualizes GS from the supply chain perspective and in the consumer‐product context to develop a GS measurement model. Collecting secondary and primary data in both qualitative and quantitative forms, this study reports the development of GS multi‐item measurement scales using a multi‐method research design that combines interviews, content analysis, and mass survey. GS is operationalized as a multi‐dimensional construct reflecting three complementary dimensions, namely pollution prevention‐, product‐, and long‐term development‐oriented GS practices, where each of them comprises three sub‐dimensions, resulting in a total of 34 measurement items. The empirically validated scales can be used to advance theory and practices of GS, while providing a useful reference for firms to evaluate their GS efforts, and identify areas for improvement.

No abstract

We consider the feasibility model of multi-agent scheduling on a single machine, where each agent's objective function is to minimize the total weighted number of tardy jobs. We show that the problem is strongly NP-complete in general. When the number of agents is fixed, we first show that the problem can be solved in pseudo-polynomial time for integral weights, and can be solved in polynomial time for unit weights; then we present a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for the problem.