High Multiplicity Scheduling Problems

These four years proved to be a very interesting and enjoyable period of my life. I was introduced to the international research community and visited many scientific events in different parts of the world. First of all, I want to heartily thank my supervisors, Antoon Kolen, Yves Crama, and Joris van de Klundert, for haven given me the opportunity to join the scientific world and academic community, for their support, their trust and their continuous advise. This thesis would never exist without the contribution of these people. I feel much indebted also to Gerhard Woeginger, Frits Spieksma, and Nadia Brauner. Many results of this thesis were written in joint papers and for me it was a big pleasure to work with them. I am also thankful to Wieslaw Kubiak, Renato Monteiro, Leen Stougie, and Jos Sturm for reading the drafts of my papers, for their comments and for providing me with many useful references. I want to thank Stan van Hoesel, Marc Uetz, and Vitaly Strusevich for awakening and developing my interests in many other fields of combinatorial optimization other than high multiplicity scheduling. My thanks go to Roel Romero for the discussions on numerous topics in operations research and combinatorial optimization. I am grateful to my Russian colleagues, teachers and friends, Erik Rulands for creating a nice atmosphere where I was able to work effectively and write the thesis in time. Finally, I address my warm thanks to my wife, my parents and my son for their moral support during these four years.