SGER: A New Direction for Applied Scheduling and Sequencing Research

这笔赠款为开发一个统一的框架提供资金，以解决大规模的实际调度和排序问题。该框架的灵感来自PI最近在解决排序问题方面的突破。要开发的框架将利用这个新的解决方案，通过一个聪明的Dantzig-Wolfe分解方案和列生成技术解决任何一般问题的过程中的权力。所考虑的一般调度问题涉及在不同的制造设备上执行的作业或操作（例如，流水车间和作业车间）。调度目标包括广泛的常用标准，如完工时间，总加权完工时间，总加权拖期，总加权提前-拖期。本项目的成功完成将足以证明所提出的框架的强大功能，并激发研究人员和实践者对沿着这一方向进行后续研究的更广泛兴趣。期望本研究能对调度和排序理论的发展做出贡献。更重要的是，它将为解决大规模的现实问题提供新的算法。这些研究成果将产生工具，以改善日常调度决策的制造企业复杂的调度问题。

This grant provides funding for the development of a unified framework to solve large-scale, practical scheduling and sequencing problems. The framework is inspired by PI's recent breakthrough in the solution of a sequencing problem. The framework to be developed will leverage the power of this new solution procedure in solving any general problem through a clever Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition scheme and column generation technique. The general scheduling problems under consideration involve jobs or operations to be performed on different manufacturing equipment (for example, flow shop and job shop). The scheduling objectives encompass a wide range of commonly used criteria such as makespan, total weighted completion time, total weighted tardiness, and total weighted earliness-tardiness. A series of computational experiments with four specific problems will be conducted.The successful completion of this project will be sufficient to demonstrate the power of the proposed framework and stimulate broader interest among researchers and practitioners for follow-up research along this direction. It is expected that the research will contribute to the state of the art in scheduling and sequencing theory. More importantly, it will provide new algorithms for tackling large-scale, real-life problems. These research results will generate tools to improve daily scheduling decisions in manufacturing firms with complex scheduling issues.