The scheduling problem addressed in this paper concerns a manufacturer who produces a variety of product types and operates in a make-to-order environment. Each customer order consists of known quantities of the different product types, and must be delivered as a single shipment. Periodically...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...

The standard one-machine scheduling problem consists in scheduling a set of jobs in one machine which can handle only one job at a time, minimizing the maximum lateness. Each job is available for processing at its release date, requires a known processing time and after finishing the processing,...

In today's competitive markets, the importance of good scheduling strategies in manufacturing companies lead to the need of developing efficient methods to solve complex scheduling problems. In this paper, we studied two production scheduling problems with sequence-dependent setups times. The...

In many applications, robotic cells are used in repetitive production of identical parts. A robotic cell contains two or more robot-served machines. The robot can have single or dual gripper. The cycle time is the time to produce a part in the cell. We consider single part-type problems. Since...

This paper is concerned with an asymptotic analysis of hierarchical production and setup scheduling in a stochastic manufacturing system consisting of a single failure-prone machine and facing constant demands for a number of products. At any given time the system can only produce one type of...

This paper presents an asymptotic analysis of hierarchical production planning in a manufacturing system with two tandem machines that are subject to breakdown and repair. The system produces a single product, whose rate of demand over time is given to be constant. The problem is formulated as a...

In this paper, we treat an optimal control problem of a stochastic two-machine flowshop with machines subject to random breakdown and repair. While the problem is difficult to solve, it can be approximated by a deterministic problem when the rates of machine failure and repair become large....

We consider an N-machine flowshop with unreliable machines and bounds on work-in-process. Machine capacities and demand processes are finite-state Markov chains. The problem is to choose the rates of production on the machines over time to minimize the expected discounted costs of production and...