Title: Scheduling with team production effects

Authors: Tobias Wiens; Christian A. Ullrich

Addresses: Department of Business Administration and Economics, Universitaetsstrasse 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany ' Department of Business Administration and Economics, Universitaetsstrasse 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany

Abstract: This paper introduces the new research field of team assignment and scheduling, while taking into account the team production effect. In contrast to the opinions prevalent in the literature on job-splitting, a given job's processing time is not simply its default processing time on one machine divided by the number of machines assigned to that job. Synergies may lead to nonlinear relations between the number of assigned machines and the resulting processing times. After combining team production and scheduling theory in general, we focus on two common problem areas: minimising the maximum completion time and minimising the total tardiness. In the face of NP-hardness, we propose a specialised genetic algorithm which is general enough to tackle both problem areas. Computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

Keywords: scheduling; team production; parallel machines; genetic algorithm; neighbourhood search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2023.134783

International Journal of Operational Research, 2023 Vol.48 No.3, pp.281 - 315

Received: 03 May 2020
Accepted: 15 Jan 2021
Published online: 10 Nov 2023 *

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