This book provides an introduction to the models, methods, and results
of some due date-related scheduling problems in the field of multiagent
scheduling. In multiagent scheduling, two or more agents share a common
processing resource and each agent wants to optimize its own objective
function with respect to its own set of jobs. Since the agents have
conflicting objective functions, they have to negotiate among themselves
with regard to sharing the common resource to optimize their own
objective functions. A key feature of due date-related scheduling
concerns the way in which due dates are considered: they can be given
parameters or decision variables. For the former case, the motivation
stems from the need to improve inventory and production management. For
the latter case, due date assignment becomes a challenging issue since
the decision-maker has to balance inventory holding costs against the
benefits of fulfifilling orders in time.
As for due dates, this book addresses the following three different
scenarios: (i) The due dates of the jobs from either one or both of the
two agents are decision variables, which are determined using some due
date assignment models; (ii) The due dates of jobs in each job set are
considered as given parameters, whereas which due date corresponds to a
given job needs to determine; and (iii) The due date of each job is
exogenously given. When the last case is involved, the objective
function of each agent is related to the number of just-in-time jobs
that are completed exactly on their due dates.
For each considered scenario, depending on the model settings, and on
the objective function of each agent, this book addresses the
complexity, and the design of efficient exact or approximated
algorithms.
This book aims at introducing the author's research achievements in due
date-related scheduling with two agents. It is written for researchers
and Ph.D. students working in scheduling theory and other members of
scientific community who are interested in recent scheduling models. Our
goal is to enable the reader to know about some new achievements on this
topic.
