Integrated scheduling of production and distribution with two competing agents

AbstractThis paper studies a two-agent scheduling problem on a single batch machine. Each job j has a processing time pj and a size sj. Jobs should be delivered to the agent as soon as possible. The objective is to minimize the service span of the first agent subject to an upper bound on the makespan of the other agent. We propose two approximation algorithms when jobs have identical processing times and in the general case. Then we conduct theoretical analyses to provide the provable guarantees on the performances of the algorithms. Finally, we conduct simulation analyses based on randomly generated instances to evaluate the average performances of the algorithm in the general case.Keywords: Batch machinetwo competing agentsschedulingdeliveryapproximation algorithms Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 72371093 and 72071056. This work is also partly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China 2019YFE0110300.