In the context of job scheduling, the time required to complete a task is related not only to the intrinsic difficulty of the task, but also to the operator's willingness to speed up (or slow down) its execution. In fact, service operators are sometimes authorized to flexibly calibrate job...

A heuristic procedure is developed for minimizing makespan in flow-shop scheduling problems. In comparison with current algorithms, our algorithm seems to result in an improved makespan with a small additional computational effort. An algorithm is also developed to minimize the required number...