Scheduling Computer and Manufacturing Processes

This book is a continuation of Scheduling in Computer and Manufacturing Sys tems 1, two editions of which have received kind acceptance of a wide readership. As the previous position, it is the result of a collaborative German-Polish project which has been partially supported by Committee for Scientific Research 2 and DFG. We appreciate this help. We decided to treat this work as a new book rather than the third edition of the previous one due to two important reasons. First of all, the contents has been changed significantly. This concerns not only corrections we have introduced following the suggestions made by many readers (we are very grateful to all of them!) and taking into account our own experience, but first of all this means that important new material has been added. In particular, in the introductory part the ideas of new local search heuristics, i. e. generally applicable global optimization strategies with a simple capability of learning (ejection chains, genetic algo rithms) have been presented. In the framework of parallel processor scheduling, topics of imprecise computations and lot size scheduling have been studied. Further on flow shop and job shop scheduling problems have been studied much more extensively, both from the viewpoint of exact algorithms as well as heuris tics.