To lead: here and now! Specifically mindfulness techniques in the service of leadership

"...not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury... nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize." (Pico Iyer, 2014, page 15). Mindfulness focuses on the "here and now" without judgment, reaction or the intent to influence. During the last decade, the practice of mindfulness meditation in business life, in the military and in professional sports, has become a major trend. But what is the reason behind the success of mindful techniques? Why do western capitalism look for inspiration in eastern mysticism? In our pilot study we tried to investigate how mindful meditation can answer the challenges of today's executives, and by introducing such methods what conditions should be considered

Planning and scheduling in the digital factory

Production planning and scheduling with the aid of software tools in today’s manufacturing industries have become a common practice which is indispensable for providing high level customer service, and at the same time to utilize the production resources, like workforce, machine tools, raw materials, energy, etc., efficiently. To meet the new requirements, problem modeling tools, optimization techniques, and visualization of data and results have become part of the software packages. In this chapter some recent developments in problem modeling and optimization techniques applied to important and challenging industrial planning and scheduling problems are presented. We will focus on new problem areas which are still at the edge of current theoretical research, but they are motivated by practical needs. On the one hand, we will discuss project based production planning, and on the other hand, we will tackle a resource leveling problems in a machine environment. We will present the problems, some modeling and solution approaches, and various extensions and applications

Approximation schemes for parallel machine scheduling with non-renewable resources

In this paper the approximability of parallel machine scheduling problems with resource consuming jobs is studied. In these problems, in addition to a parallel machine environment, there are non-renewable resources, like raw materials, energy, or money, consumed by the jobs. Each resource has an initial stock, and some additional supplies at a-priori known moments in time and in known quantities. The schedules must respect the resource constraints as well. The optimization objective is either the makespan, or the maximum lateness. Polynomial time approximation schemes are provided under various assumptions, and it is shown that the makespan minimization problem is APX-complete if the number of machines is part of the input even if there are only two resources. © 2016 Elsevier B.V

Scheduling of inventory releasing jobs to minimize a regular objective function of delivery times

In this note we provide new complexity and algorithmic results for scheduling inventory releasing jobs, a new class of single machine scheduling problems proposed recently by Boysen et al. We focus on tardiness related criteria, while known results are concerned with inventory levels between fixed delivery points. Our interest is motivated by the fact that deciding whether a feasible schedule exists is NP-hard in the strong sense, provided that all delivery deadlines are fixed, and there are no restrictions on the amount of products released by the jobs, nor on the job processing times. We will establish NP-hardness results, or provide polynomial or pseudo-polynomial time algorithms for various special cases, and describe a fully polynomial approximation scheme for one of the variants with the maximum tardiness criterion. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Car Sequencing with respect to Regular Expressions and Linear Bounds

In this paper we introduce a new model and a computational approach for sequencing assembly lines with two types of constraints: (i) patterns described by regular expressions and (ii) linear bounds on the number of certain products that may occur in pre-specified intervals. If we restrict the problem to the second type of constraints only we obtain a generalization of the familiar car sequencing problem, whereas constraints of type (i) may be useful to add extra structure. Constraints of both types may have priorities and can be violated, and a Pareto optimal solution is sought minimizing the violation of constraints in the given priority order. We describe a computational method based on mathematical programming and genetic algorithms for finding suboptimal solutions

Serial Dictatorship Mechanism for Project Scheduling with Non-Renewable Resources

This paper considers a resource-constrained project scheduling problem with self-interested agents. A novel resource allocation model is presented and studied in a mechanism design setting without money. The novelties and specialties of our contribution include that the nonrenewable resources are supplied at different dates, the jobs requiring the resources are related with precedence relations, and the utilities of the agents are based on the tardiness values of their jobs. We modify a classical scheduling algorithm for implementing the Serial Dictatorship Mechanism, which is then proven to be truthful and Pareto-optimal. Furthermore, the properties of the social welfare are studied