Scheduling

To take full advantage of high performance computing, parallel applications must be carefully managed to guarantee quality of service and fairness in using shared resources. Scheduling for parallel computing is an interdisciplinary subject joining many fields, and the broadness of research yields an immense number and diversity of models for understanding scheduling problems.

Christian A. Ullrich investigates the optimization potential of integrated supply chain scheduling approaches. Considering a company-internal supply chain, the author´s first research question is whether the results of integrating machine scheduling and vehicle routing are significantly better than those of classic decomposition approaches which break down the overall problem and solve the subproblems successively. The scope is then broadened to include the machine and transportation scheduling problems of two and more companies at consecutive supply chain stages. The last part of this dissertation addresses supply chain contracting issues.

Scheduling theory has received a growing interest since its origins in the second half of the 20th century. Developed initially for the study of scheduling problems with a single objective, the theory has been recently extended to problems involving multiple criteria. However, this extension has still left a gap between the classical multi-criteria approaches and some real-life problems in which not all jobs contribute to the evaluation of each criterion.

This book presents some new applications and trends related to task and data scheduling. This book presents novel algorithms and literature reviews that will guide current and new researchers who work with load balancing, scheduling, and allocation problems.

This book presents a first attempt to systematically collect, classify and solve various continuous-time scheduling problems. The classes of problems distinguish scheduling by the number of machines and products, production constraints and performance measures. Although such classes are usually considered to be a prerogative of only combinatorial scheduling literature, the scheduling methodology suggested in this book is based on two mathematical tools - optimal control and combinatorics.