Abstract Single-machine scheduling where jobs have a penalty for being late or rejected altogether is an important (sub)problem in manufacturing, logistics, and satellite scheduling. It known to be NP-hard the strong sense, there no polynomial-time algorithm that can guarantee constant-factor approximation (unless P=NP). We provide exact fixed-parameter tractable slack maximum number of time wi...

We consider scheduling a single server in a multi-class queue subject to setup times and setup costs. We examine the issue of whether or not reductions in the mean and variance of the setup time distributions can lead to degraded system performance. Provided that setups are reduced according to a stochastically smaller ordering, we show that if an optimal policy is used both for the original sy...

The frequent changeovers in the production processes indicate the importance of setup time in many real-world manufacturing activities. The traditional approaches in dealing with setup times are that either to omit or to merge into the processing times so as to simplify the problems. These approaches could reduce the complexity of the problem, but often generated unrealistic outcomes because of...

The problem addressed in this paper is scheduling jobs on unrelated parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times to minimize the maximum completion time (i.e., the makespan). This problem is NP-hard even without including setup times. Adding sequence-dependent setup times adds another dimension of complexity to the problem and obtaining optimal solutions becomes very difficult especial...