2 Abstract Every rail operator wishes to minimise the size of their locomotive fleet in order to reduce costs. This minimum fleet size problem requires a rail operator to allocate locomotives to the trains in a predefined train schedule so that the total number of locomotives required is minimised. The key to this is deciding how and when to transfer locomotives to where they can be better util...

The vast majority of project scheduling efforts assume complete information about the scheduling problem to be solved and a static deterministic environment within which the pre-computed baseline schedule will be executed. In reality, however, project activities are subject to considerable uncertainty, which generally leads to numerous schedule disruptions. It is of interest to develop pre-sche...

Most static task scheduling algorithms schedule tasks in non-preemptive mode. Basic reason of such tendency is that preemption invokes overheads and it does not help to minimize its schedule length. We found that preemption helps to reduce the number of processors while the schedule length does not increase. We propose a task scheduling algorithm that applies task preemption. The basic process ...

Finding a hard real-time feasible schedule is not trivial since this problem is NP-hard in its general form. There are two general approaches for scheduling tasks: runtime and pre-runtime scheduling. For many cases, runtime methods do not find a feasible schedule even if such a schedule exists. Such situations often occurs when the design model imposes intertask relations, such as precedence an...

Finding a feasible schedule is not trivial, because this problem is NP-Hard in its general form. There are two general approaches for scheduling tasks in real-time systems: runtime (or on-line) and pre-runtime (or off-line) scheduling. For many cases, runtime methods do not find a feasible schedule even if such a schedule exists. Such situations often occurs when the design model imposes intert...

With the perspective of a future widespread penetration of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) imminent challenges arise. Since an uncontrolled way of vehicle charging might impose additional system strain by adding up on existing peak-demands, there exists the necessity to find a charging management procedure, which is beneficial in terms of grid operation and cost. In this thesis a centralized c...

We present a task duplication based scalable scheduling algorithm for Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP), called S3MP (Scalable Scheduling for SMP), to address the problem of task scheduling. The algorithm pre-allocates network communication resources so as to avoid potential communication conflicts, and generates a schedule for the number of processors available in a SMP. This algorithm employs h...

In three experiments rats were given pre-exposure to two compound flavours, AX and BX, the two compounds being presented for some subjects on alternate trials (the intermixed schedule) and, for others, in separate blocks of trials (the blocked schedule). After aversion conditioning with A (in Experiments 1 and 2), the inhibitory properties of B were tested using both retardation (Experiment 1) ...

Nurse Rostering problems represent a subclass of scheduling problems that are hard to solve. Their complexity is due to the large solution spaces and the many objectives and constraints that need to be fulfilled. In this study, we propose a hierarchical method of granulation of problem domain through preprocessing of constraints. A set of zero-cost patterns in the granulated search space provid...