Stability Radius of an Optimal Schedule: A Survey and Recent Developments

What is it about?

The usual assumption that the processing times of the operations are known in advance is the strictest one in deterministic scheduling theory and it essentially restricts its practical aspects. Indeed, this assumption is not valid for the most real-world processes. This survey is devoted to a stability analysis of an optimal schedule which may help to extend the significance of scheduling theory for some production scheduling problems. We present formulas for the calculation of the stability radius, when the objective is to minimize mean or maximum flow time. Moreover, computational results on the calculation of the stability radius for randomly generated job shop scheduling problems are briefly discussed. We also show that the well-known test problem with 6 jobs and 6 machines has both stable and unstable optimal makespan schedules.

Featured Image