Discussion Papers on Economics,
University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we present a new scheduling problem and describe a shortest path based heuristic as well as a dynamic programming based exact optimization algorithm to solve it. The Selective Multi-Category Parallel-Servicing Problem (SMCPSP) arises when a set of jobs has to be scheduled on a server (machine) with limited capacity. Each job requests service in a prespecified time window and belongs to a certain category. Jobs may be serviced partially, incurring a penalty; however, only jobs of the same category can be processed simultaneously. One must identify the best subset of jobs to process in each time interval of a given planning horizon while respecting the server capacity and scheduling requirements. We compare the proposed solution methods with a MILP formulation and show that the dynamic programming approach is faster when the number of categories is large, whereas the MILP can be solved faster when the number of categories is small.

Keywords: Machine scheduling; dynamic programming; node-disjoint shortest-path problem; preprocessing

JEL-codes: C61

26 pages, March 5, 2013

Full text files

dpbe5_2013.pdf  Full text

Download statistics

• University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Astrid Holm Nielsen ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

RePEc:hhs:sdueko:2013_005This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:17:01.