X. Cai, C.Y. Lee and George Vairakarakis
Suppose a manufacturer has received a number of orders (jobs) from his customers, which should be completed by their respective due dates. Most of the facilities needed to process the jobs are available in the manufacturer’s own factory. However, for some reason, certain parts of the jobs must be outsourced to a third party who possesses the machines needed to process these parts. The availability of the third-party machines is negotiable, depending on the price. Consequently, the manufacturer has to (1) negotiate an agreement to secure the machine time on the third-party machines, and (2) generate a schedule to process the jobs, so as to minimize the total cost, including the cost for the use of the third-party machines and the cost incurred if the due dates of the jobs cannot be met. In general, consideration of third-party machines in machine scheduling problems relaxes a common assumption made in traditional scheduling studies. The main objective of this project is to explore models and algorithms to solve this new branch of scheduling problems. Nash Bargaining theory will be applied.