How do experienced spreadsheet users compare to inexperienced ones, and what light can this comparison shed on spreadsheet best practices? This is the question we address in this paper, using the results from a survey of nearly 1600 respondents. This survey was completed by a wide range of...

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...

We address the single-machine stochastic scheduling problem with an objective of minimizing total expected earliness and tardiness costs, assuming that processing times follow normal distributions and due dates are decisions. We develop a branch and bound algorithm to find optimal solutions to...

We consider single-machine stochastic scheduling models with due dates as decisions. In addition to showing how to satisfy given service-level requirements, we examine variations of a model in which the tightness of due-dates conflicts with the desire to minimize tardiness. We show that a...

The deterministic multi-product single-machine production and inventory problem is one of the simplest models in which production and inventory factors interact. There is at present no algorithm available which solves the problem optimally, and several different types of approaches have been...

We investigate how to allocate work in stochastic assembly systems so as to maximize throughput. We use Markov models for systems with exponential processing times and simulation-based methods for other probability distributions. We find that assembly systems should be unbalanced in the...