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Project scheduling under competition
Author(s) -
Averbakh Igor,
Lebedev Vasilij
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
naval research logistics (nrl)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.665
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1520-6750
pISSN - 0894-069X
DOI - 10.1002/nav.20091
Subject(s) - heuristics , computer science , profit (economics) , scheduling (production processes) , mathematical optimization , operations research , job shop scheduling , mathematics , microeconomics , economics , schedule , operating system
We introduce and investigate the problem of scheduling activities of a project by a firm that competes with another firm (the competitor) that has to perform the same project. The profit that the firm gets from each activity depends on whether the firm finishes the activity before or after its competitor. The objective is to maximize the guaranteed (worst‐case) profit. We assume that both the firm and the competitor can perform only one activity at a time. We perform a detailed complexity analysis of the problem, and consider problems with and without precedence constraints, with and without delay of the competitor, with general and equal processing times of activities. For polynomially solvable cases (which include, for example, all the considered problems without delay of the competitor), we present easily implementable and intuitive rules that allow us to obtain optimal schedules in linear or almost linear time. For some NP‐hard cases, we present pseudopolynomial algorithms and fast heuristics with worst‐case approximation guarantees. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.