We consider a scheduling problem in a home healthcare system in which nurses visit patients regularly for relatively minor healthcare services. Intervals between the visits may differ for different patients. On each day in the planning horizon, a nurse must visit the patients assigned to her/him on that day, and then return to the hospital. For the problem of determining the visiting schedule with the objective of minimizing total travel time of the nurse over the planning horizon, we develop a two-phase heuristic algorithm. To evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm, a series of computational tests is performed on a number of randomly generated problem instances and a real instance. Results of the tests show that the heuristic algorithm gives near optimal solutions for problems of practical sizes in a reasonable time.
This paper considers a two-machine re-entrant flowshop scheduling problem in which there are two classes of jobs with different urgencies, i.e., urgent jobs and normal (not urgent) jobs. The objective of this problem is minimizing total tardiness of one class of urgent jobs and maximum completion times of the other class of normal jobs. To solve this problem, a lower bound and several heuristic algorithms for the problem are proposed. To evaluate the performance of developed algorithms, computational experiments are performed on randomly generated problems, and results are reported with analysis. The suggested algorithms show better performances compared with the ones used in real manufacturing systems in terms of solution quality and computation time. Jeong and Shim, Journal of Advanced Mechanical Design, Systems, and Manufacturing, Vol.11, No.5 (2017) complete urgent jobs as early as possible since these jobs had very early due dates. In this problem, due dates of urgent jobs are set to the earliest possible completion times of the job on machine 2 (completion times of the job on machine 2 assuming that the job is processed through all machines without waiting). In this study, the objective of the problem is minimizing a weighted sum of total tardiness of urgent jobs and the maximum completion time of normal jobs.Re-entrant flowshop scheduling problems receive increasing attention in recent years. Graves et al. (1983) introduce a wafer fab in semi-conductor manufacturing system as a re-entrant flowshop and propose a simple scheduling algorithm for the re-entrant flowshop to minimize average throughput time while meeting a given production rate. Demirkol and Uzsoy (2000) suggest decomposition methods in a re-entrant flowshop for the objective of minimizing maximum lateness. Choi and Kim (2007) The problem in this study is one of the multi-objective flowshop problems since two types of measures are combined, i.e. weighted sum of total tardiness of urgent jobs and the maximum completion time of normal jobs. There have been various heuristic algorithms for multiple-objective flowshop problems including Rajendran and Ziegler (2004), Ravindran objective problems have two or more common objective functions for all jobs, this problem has a different objective function for jobs of a different class since jobs are classified into two classes according to their urgencies. Therefore, this problem is related to a multi-agent problem which is the special case of multi-objective problems. (Agnetis et al., 2004) Multi-agent problems consist of two or more agents (class or customers) and each agent has a different objective function for their jobs. That is, if we define each class of jobs as an agent, the problem in this paper can be regarded as a multiagent problem.Recently, multi-agent scheduling problems are also studied. Baker and Smith (2003) study weighted optimization problem for the multi-agent on single machine, the objectives including the maximum lateness, total weighted completion time and makespan. Agn...
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