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                                                     Seminar

             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Title	:	STOCHASTIC BATCH SCHEDULING AND THE \"SMALLEST VARIANCE FIRST\" RULE
Speaker	:	Prof. Michael Pinedo
		Stern School of Business
		New York University
Date	:	June 30th, 2008 (Monday)
Time	:	4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Venue	:	Room 513
		William M.W. Mong Engineering Building
		(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)
		CUHK

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Abstract:
　

Consider a single machine that can process multiple jobs in batch mode. We have n
Jobs and the processing time of job j is a random variable X_j with distribution F_j.
Up to b jobs can be processed simultaneously by the machine. The jobs in a batch all have to start at the same time and the batch is completed when all jobs have finished their processing (i.e., at the maximum of the processing times of the jobs in that batch). We are interested in two objective functions, namely the minimization of the expected makespan and the minimization of the total expected completion time. We first show that under certain fairly general conditions, the minimization of the expected makespan is equivalent to specific deterministic combinatorial problems, namely the Weighted Matching problem and the Set Partitioning problem. We then consider the case when all jobs have the same mean processing time but different variances. We show that for certain special classes of processing time distributions the Smallest Variance First rule minimizes the expected makespan as well as the total expected completion time. In our conclusions we present various general rules that are suitable for the minimization of the expected makespan and the total expected completion time in batch scheduling.

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Biography:
　

Michael Pinedo received the Ir. degree in mechanical engineering from the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands in 1973 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D degrees in Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978.

He is the Julius Schlesinger Professor of Operations Management and Chair of the Department of Information, Operations and Management Sciences at the Stern School of Business at New York University. From 1982 to 1997 he taught in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University. He taught at the Insituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (Caracas) from 1978 to 1980 and at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1982.

His research focuses on the modeling of production and service systems, and, more specifically, on the planning and scheduling of these systems. He has written or jointly written numerous technical papers on these topics. He is author of the text \'Scheduling: Theory, Algorithms and Systems\' (with Prentice-Hall), coauthor of a book on \'Operations Scheduling with Applications in Manufacturing and Services\' (with McGraw-Hill/Irwin), coauthor of \'Queueing Networks: Customers, Signals and Product Form Solutions\' (with Wiley), and co-editor of \'Creating Value in Financial Services: Strategies, Operations, and Technologies\' (with Kluwer).

Over the last decade he has been involved in industrial systems development. He supervised the design, development and implementation of two planning and scheduling systems for the International Paper Company. He also actively participated in the development of systems at Philips Electronics, Siemens, and at Merck.

He is Editor of Journal of Scheduling (Wiley). He has been an area editor of Operations Research (covering stochastic processes) and a department editor of IIE Scheduling and Logistics (covering scheduling). He is currently associate editor of Management Science, associate editor of Interfaces and senior editor of Manufacturing and Services Operations Management.

************************* ALL ARE WELCOME ************************

Host	:	Prof. Zhou,Xiang, Sean
Tel	:	(852) 2609-8336
Email	:	zhoux@se.cuhk.edu.hk
Enquiries	:	Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou
	:	Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
		CUHK
Website	:	http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810
Email	:	seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk

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