We study the online version of the scheduling problem Q||Cmax involving selfish agents, considered by Archer and Tardos in [FOCS 2001], where jobs must be scheduled on m related machines, each of them owned by a different selfish agent. We present a general technique for transforming competitive online algorithms for Q||Cmax into truthful online mechanisms with a small loss of competitiveness. ...

We study the design of optimal mechanisms in a setting where job-agents compete for being processed by a service provider that can handle one job at a time. Each job has a processing time and incurs a waiting cost. Jobs need to be compensated for waiting. We consider two models, one where only the waiting costs of jobs are private information (1-d), and another where both waiting costs and proc...

This paper will present an agent based solution to control chemical processes in a manufacturing environment; items should undergo chemical reactions in different chemical baths to be processed by the system. Recipes for the processes only specify minimum and maximum times for each bath, and recipes depend strongly on characteristics of the item. We have applied the PACO paradigm for reactive a...

Article history: Received 9 October 2011 Available online 3 May 2013 JEL classification: C72 D71 D82

We consider the problem of designing truthful mechanisms on m unrelated machines, to minimize some optimization goal. Nisan and Ronen (1999) consider the specific goal of makespan minimization, and show a lower bound of 2, and an upper bound of m. This large gap inspired many attempts that yielded positive results for several special cases, but very partial success for the general case: the low...

1 Abbreviations and Notation 3

background and objectives: operating room (or) scheduling is key to optimal operating room productivity. the significant uncertainty associated with surgery duration renders scheduling of surgical operation a challenging task. this paper proposes a novel computational stochastic model to optimize scheduling of surgeries with uncertain durations. the model considers various surgical operation co...