X. Cai and X. Zhou
We study a new class of scheduling problems involving perishable jobs with post-completion deterioration, where each finished product will be picked up by a transporter that arrives with uncertainty. The processing time to complete a job, as well as its fresh time, are random variables. If a job is finished too early, it may decay and thus incur a decaying cost; on the other hand, if it misses the pickup, it will suffer a loss due to such causes as having to be put to a local market at a discounted price. The problem is to determine an optimal policy to process and handle all the jobs, so as to minimize the total expected loss. The objective of this project is to develop an in-depth study of scheduling problems with features as described above. Topics to be addressed include those on modelling, propositions of optimal policies, and algorithms.