In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t South America lost more genera in the Quaternary megafaunal extinction than any other continent, but how it ...

The single machine scheduling problem is considered in which each task has a release dates, a processing time and a due date. The objective is to mimimize the maximum lateness. Preemption is not allowed. Scheduling problem 1|rj |Lmax is a NP-hard problem. We define an IIT (inserted idle time) schedule as a feasible schedule in which a processor is kept idle at a time when it could begin process...

The problem of minimizing the expected number of tardy jobs in a dynamic m machine flow shop i.e., Fm�rj�E�∑Uj� is studied in this research. It is assumed that the jobs with deterministic processing times and stochastic due dates arrive dynamically and randomly to the flow shop cell. The due date of each job is assumed to be normally distributed with known mean and variance. A dynamic method is...

The well established phenomenon 0/ seasonality 0/ birth dates (winter excess) and admission dates (summer excess) o/patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder was re-examined in a Southern A/rican study 0/ ill-patients. Monthly and seasonal analyses relpectively resulted in a May (late autumn and winter) excess o/schizophrenic male births and a March (late summer and autumn) excess among ...

This paper addresses a static, n-job, single-machine scheduling problem with sequence dependent family setups. The setup matrix follows a special structure where a constant setup is required only if a job from a smaller indexed family is an immediate successor of one from a larger indexed family. The objective is to minimize the maximum lateness (Lmax). A two-step neighborhood search procedure ...

Focusing on the just-in-time (JIT) operations management, earliness as well as, tardiness of jobs’ production and delivery should be discouraged. In accordance to this philosophy, scheduling problems involving earliness and tardiness penalties are very critical for the operations manager. In this paper, a new population heuristic based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is prese...

The presence of random yields in many manufacturing processes can considerably complicate production planning and control. We investigate a batch production system with due dates, where the yield of each batch is random and the production lead time is longer than the time interval between starting consecutive batches. To satisfy an order with a given due date, several input batches could be ini...