This paper, motivated by a collaboration with a healthcare service provider, focuses on stochastic open-shop service networks with two objectives: more traditional macro-level measures (such as minimizing total system time or minimizing total number of tardy customers) and the atypical micro-level measure of reducing the incidents of excessively long waits at any workstation within the process....

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. Th...

One of the main restrictions in scheduling problems are the machine (resource) restrictions: each machine can perform at most one job at a time. We explore machine dependencies is shop scheduling problems representing them as graphs. Our study shows that the structure of machine dependency graphs is important in the complexity analysis of shop scheduling problems. We call acyclic a shop schedul...

A fast branch & bound method for the open-shop problem based on a disjunctive graph formulation of the problem is developed. Computational results show that the method yields excellent results. Some benchmark problems from the literature were solved to optimality for the first time.

We propose a linear time algorithm, called G2DLP, for generating 2D lattice L(n1, n2) paths, equivalent to two-item } B , {A 2 1 n n multiset permutations, with a given number of turns. The usage of turn has three meanings: in the context of multiset permutations, it means that two consecutive elements of a permutation belong to two different items; in lattice path enumerations, it means that t...