A suboptimality bound for permutation policies in single machine stochastic scheduling

Abstract

A general class of single machine stochastic scheduling problems incorporating precedence constraints is modelled as a family of competing Markov decision processes. A bound on the optimal return yields a suboptimality bound for permutation policies. This in turn leads to a generalised “used better than new” principle as a (highly intuitive) sufficient condition for the optimality of a permutation policy in the class of all (preemptive) policies. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Operations and Shipment Scheduling of a Batch on a Flexible Machine

“…The single multifunctional machine scheduling problem must be distinguished from a number of other multifunctional machine scheduling problems which have been considered in the literature. Glazebrook (1980Glazebrook ( , 1995, Sidney (1975), and Benkherouf et al (1994) have considered the scheduling of jobs on a single multifunctional machine with precedence constraints. However, in their model each job only requires one operation on the machine and the precedence constraints are on the sequence in which the jobs are completed.…”