Batch delivery scheduling with batch delivery cost on a single machine

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ON-LINE NETWORK SCHEDULING IN EMERGENCY OPERATION FOR MEDICAL RESOURCES WITH SINGLE-PROCESSOR SINGLE-DESTINATION

Emergency Management has received more and more attention in the recent years. Most research in this eld focused on evacuation of victims from dangerous places to safe places, but little on allocation of medical resources to safe places and/or transportation tools to the dangerous places. This thesis studies the problem of delivering medical resources from medical centers to the temporary aid site in a disaster-a ected area to help the wounded victims. In particular, this thesis describes a new algorithm for solving this problem. As requirements of medical resources for a disaster a ected area are not known in advance, the problem is in the so-called on-line environment. The algorithm for such a problem is also called on-line algorithm. The evaluation criterion for such an on-line algorithm is the so-called competitive ratio. This thesis considers four cases of such a problem: (1) the capacity of vehicles for transporting medical resources and the number of vehicles are both in nite, (2) the capacity of vehicles is in nite but the number of vehicles is one, (3) the capacity of vehicles is nite and the number of vehicles is in nite, (4) the capacity of vehicles is nite and the number of vehicles is one. Algorithms for the four cases are called H1, H2, H3, and H4, ii respectively. For all these cases, this thesis presents properties, appropriate on-line algorithms and theoretical analysis of these algorithms. The result of the analysis shows that H1 and H3 are optimal based on the competitive ratio criterion while the other two have a very small gap in terms of the optimum criterion. The thesis also presents a case study for having a sense of the performance of H2 and demonstrating practicality of the developed algorithms. The result of this thesis has contributions to the eld of resource planning and scheduling and has application in not only emergency management but also supply chain management in manufacturing and construction

SUPPLY CHAIN SCHEDULING FOR MULTI-MACHINES AND MULTI-CUSTOMERS

Manufacturing today is no longer a single point of production activity but a chain of activities from the acquisition of raw materials to the delivery of products to customers. This chain is called supply chain. In this chain of activities, a generic pattern is: processing of goods (by manufacturers) and delivery of goods (to customers). This thesis concerns the scheduling operation for this generic supply chain. Two performance measures considered for evaluation of a particular schedule are: time and cost. Time refers to a span of the time that the manufacturer receives the request of goods from the customer to the time that the delivery tool (e.g. vehicle) is back to the manufacturer. Cost refers to the delivery cost only (as the production cost is considered as fi xed). A good schedule is thus with short time and low cost; yet the two may be in conflict. This thesis studies the algorithm for the supply chain scheduling problem to achieve a balanced short time and low cost. Three situations of the supply chain scheduling problem are considered in this thesis: (1) a single machine and multiple customers, (2) multiple machines and a single customer and (3) multiple machines and multiple customers. For each situation, di fferent vehicles characteristics and delivery patterns are considered. Properties of each problem are explored and algorithms are developed, analysed and tested (via simulation). Further, the robustness of the scheduling algorithms under uncertainty and the resilience of the scheduling algorithms under disruptions are also studied. At last a case study, about medical resources supply in an emergency situation, is conducted to illustrate how the developed algorithms can be applied to solve the practical problem. There are both technical merits and broader impacts with this thesis study. First, the problems studied are all new problems with the particular new attributes such as on-line, multiple-customers and multiple-machines, individual customer oriented, and limited capacity of delivery tools. Second, the notion of robustness and resilience to evaluate a scheduling algorithm are to the best of the author's knowledge new and may be open to a new avenue for the evaluation of any scheduling algorithm. In the domain of manufacturing and service provision in general, this thesis has provided an e ffective and effi cient tool for managing the operation of production and delivery in a situation where the demand is released without any prior knowledge (i.e., on-line demand). This situation appears in many manufacturing and service applications