Operations Scheduling with Applications in Manufacturing and Services. Michael Pinedo and Xiuli Chao, McGraw‐Hill, New York. ISBN 0‐07‐289779‐1

This book is an outgrowth of an earlier text that appeared in 1999 under the title " Operations Scheduling with Applications in Manufacturing and Services " , coauthored with Xiuli Chao from North Carolina State. This new version has been completely reorganized and expanded in several directions including new application areas and solution methods. The application areas are divided into two parts: manufacturing applications and services applications. The book covers five areas in manufacturing, namely, project scheduling, job shop scheduling, scheduling of flexible assembly systems, economic lot scheduling, and planning and scheduling in supply chains. It covers four areas in services, namely, reservations and timetabling, tournament scheduling, planning and scheduling in transportation, and workforce scheduling. Of course, this selection does not represent all the applications of planning and scheduling in manufacturing and services. Some areas that have received a fair amount of attention in the literature, e.g., scheduling of robotic cells, have not been included. Scheduling problems in telecommu-nication and computer science have not been covered either. It seems to be harder to write a good applications-oriented book than a good theory-oriented book. In the writing of this book one question came up regularly: what should be included and what should not be included? Some difficult decisions had to be made with regard to some of the material covered. For example, should this book discuss Johnson's rule, which minimizes the makespan in a two machine flow shop? Johnson's rule is described in virtually every scheduling book and even in many books on operations management. It is mathematically elegant; but it is not clear how important it is in practice. We finally concluded that it did not deserve so much attention in an applications-oriented book such as this one. However, we did incorporate it as an exercise in the chapter on job shop scheduling and ask the student to compare its performance to that of the well-known shifting bottleneck heuristic (which is one of the better known heuristics used in practice). vi Preface The fundamentals concerning the methodologies that are used in the application chapters are covered in the appendixes. They contain the basics of mathematical programming, dynamic programming, heuristics, and constraint programming. It is not necessary to have a detailed knowledge of computational complexity in order to go through this book. However, at times some complexity terminology is used. That is, a scheduling problem may be referred to as polynomially …