Abstract :
The strength of this book is in its presentation and integration of the full range of scheduling systems, starting with the single machine or resource and moving on to assembly shops, transfer lines, dispatch and control stations, high-volume repetitive lines, and finishing with projects. An attempt is made to identify the underlying principles of the simpler systems and then apply them to the more complex. As the title implies, the emphasis is on heuristic methodologies rather than theory. There are no proofs of np-completeness and there is very little, if anything, on worstcase bounds analysis and exact methods that rely on sophisticated mathematics (e.g., generating valid inequalities for the underlying polytope of an integer programming formulation). This is not to say that the material presented is without theoretical foundation or that the authors have ignored the foundations of the field. Quite the contrary. When a procedure can be justified from a theoretical point of view, it is stated in the form of a proposition and either proven or left as an exercise for the reader to prove. For example, if the objective is to minimize the maximum tardiness on a single machine of n jobs, each with a given due date, the correspondmg proposition is that the earliest due date rule provides the optimal sequence. [Reprinted from IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, vol. 42, no. 4, November 1995]
