Flowshop scheduling problems have been extensively studied by several authors using different approaches. A typical flowshop process consists of successive manufacturing stages arranged in a single production line where different jobs have to be processed following a predefined production recipe. In this work, the scheduling of a complex flowshop process involving automated wet-etch station fro...

Flowshop scheduling is a very active research area. This problem still attracts a considerable amount of interest despite the sheer amount of available results. Total flowtime minimization of a flowshop has been actively studied and many effective algorithms have been proposed in the last few years. New best solutions have been found for common benchmarks at a rapid pace. However, these improve...

The general flowshop scheduling problem is a production problem where a set of n jobs have to be processed with identical flow pattern on m machines. In permutation flowshops the sequence of jobs is the same on all machines. A significant research effort has been devoted for sequencing jobs in a flowshop minimizing the makespan. This paper describes the application of a Constructive Genetic Alg...

Firms in information technology (IT) intensive industries rely on IT investments to improve the quality of their products and services. Competing firms in these industries need to consider two opposing effects when they make IT investment decisions. The declining cost and improving performance of IT over time provides the later entrant a potential cost advantage. On the other hand, the first en...

Scheduling in chemical flowshops is one of a number of important industrial problems which are potentially amenable to solution using the genetic algorithm. However the problem is not trivial: flowshops run continuously, and for efficient operation those controlling them must be able to adjust the order in which products are made as new requests are received. In addition, there are in principle...

Solving efficiently complex problems using metaheuristics, and in particular local search algorithms, requires incorporating knowledge about the problem to solve. In this paper, the permutation flowshop problem is studied. It is well known that in such problems, several solutions may have the same fitness value. As this neutrality property is an important issue, it should be taken into account ...

The hybrid or flexible flowshop problem is a generalization of the flowshop in such a way that every job can be processed by one among several machines on each machine stage. In recent years a number of effective exact methods have been developed. A major reason for this progress is the development of new job and machine based lower bounds as well as the rapidly increasing importance of constra...

The article builds a competitive model of the incumbent and later entrant, considering the case of single-homing andmultihoming. Results show that the conditions that later entrant platform profits exceed incumbent platform are the same underthe case of single homing and multihoming. At the same time, the later entrant should turn to charge rather than subsidizingenterprise when two platforms g...

In the competitive market of B2B e-commerce website, as customer switching cost and network externality could prevent customers to switch to later entrant, the earlier entrant has the advantage to build and retain its market share. However, the declining cost of information technology (IT) over time provides the later entrant a cost advantage. In order to maintain competitive advantage, what sh...