Robust Scheduling Problems

Abstract

In Example 7 of Chapter 2 we introduced the notion of robust scheduling. Schedulers confronted with significant processing time uncertainty often discover that a schedule which is optimal with respect to a deterministic or stochastic scheduling model yields quite poor performance when evaluated relative to the actual processing times. In these environments, the notion of schedule robustness, i.e., determining the schedule with the best worst-case performance compared to the corresponding optimal solution over all potential realizations of job processing times, is a more appropriate guide to schedule selection. The benefits of robust decision making in a scheduling context have been clearly illustrated through an example in Chapter 1 (Section 1.1 and Section 1.2).