This work deals with a scheduling problem of a real-world production process in the metal–working industry. The production process can be described as an offline stochastic flexible flow-shop problem with limited buffers. In a first step, we analyze a simplified model and develop a variable...

We investigate the stochastic flow shop problem with m machines and general distributions for processing times. No analytic method exists for solving this problem, so we looked instead at heuristic methods. We devised three constructive procedures with modest computational requirements, each...

This paper addresses a scheduling problem with random processing time when the operating system is subject to stochastic failure. First, scheduling of a single job is reviewed and the expected cost rate is obtained. Single scheduling time and multiple scheduling times for one job are discussed...

Based on theoretical arguments and empirical evidence we advocate the use of the lognormal distribution as a model for activity times. However, raw data on activity times are often subject to rounding and to the Parkinson effect. We address those factors in our statistical tests by using a...