DEDS with state dependent event durations lookahead policies and scheduling

The authors study a discrete-event distributed system (DEDS) (a flow line) which cannot be linearized and which covers a wide range of real-world situations, from plastic molding to steel milling and the service industries, where the duration of an event (a task performed on a job) is a monotonic function of the time the job spent in the system. The present model is set in a deterministic environment, with the initial conditions (i.e., release times) as control parameters. Restricting themselves to the two-machine case for simplicity, the authors prove a closed-form formula for the optimal release times of the jobs for the minimum cycle times of a (closed-loop) repeated sequence of jobs, and for the minimum flow time of a finite sequence of jobs. The corresponding scheduling problems, together with online control policies, are discussed