Note on scheduling with general learning curves to minimize the number of tardy jobs

Abstract

Several research studies have confirmed that people and organizations become better at their tasks as the tasks are repeated. The effect of this learning phenomenon on classical scheduling problems has been studied recently. One of the single-machine scheduling problems which seems to become nontrivial when learning effects are introduced is that of minimizing the number of tardy jobs. In this note, we study the special case where all jobs share a common due-date. We show that even when the learning process is assumed to be general and job-dependent, the problem remains polynomially solvable.

Keywords:

• scheduling
• single-machine
• learning curves

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Recanati Fund of the School of Business, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem and by the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada Grant Number OGP0002507.