T.C.E. Cheng - Böcker

The enduring repercussions of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the worsening global economy following the burst of the dotcom bubbles in 2001, the financial tsunami in 2008, and the incessant rise in customer demand for better services have all contributed to shrinking profit margins for businesses around the world. To cope with these challenges, firms are discovering logistics as a competitive weapon when looking for ways to strengthen and preserve their market positions. One successful solution has been the adoption of Just-in-Time manufacturing systems, which involve many functional areas of a firm such as manufacturing, engineering, marketing, and purchasing, among others. Just-in-Time Logistics extends the JIT concept in manufacturing to business logistics, an area that has been observed to account for more than 30 per cent of sales revenue for some firms. It gives you an overview and an introduction of JIT logistics, and provides managerial insights on how to achieve improved logistics performance in terms of cost and service enhancements. A discussion of the quality, implementation, and performance measurement issues related to the application of JIT in business logistics is also presented.

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.