Scheduling

This paper considers a flexible flow shop scheduling problem, where at least one production stage is made up of unrelated parallel machines.  Moreover, sequence- and machine-dependent setup times are given. The objective is to find a schedule that minimizes a convex sum of makespan and the number of tardy jobs in a static flexible flow shop environment.  For this problem, a 0-1 mixed integer program is formulated.  The problem is however a combinatorial optimization problem which is too difficult to be solved optimally for large problem sizes, and hence heuristics are used to obtain good solutions in a reasonable time.  The proposed constructive heuristics for sequencing the jobs start with the generation of the representatives of the operation time for each operation. Then some dispatching rules and flow shop makespan heuristics are developed. To improve the solutions obtained by the constructive algorithms, fast polynomial heuristic improvement algorithms based on shift moves and pairwise interchanges of jobs are applied.  In addition, metaheuristics are suggested, namely simulated annealing, tabu search and genetic algorithms.  The basic parameters of each metaheuristic are briefly discussed in this paper. The performance of the heuristics is compared relative to each other on a set of test problems with up to 50 jobs and 20 stages and with an optimal solution for small-size problems.  We have found that among the constructive algorithms the insertion based approach is superior to the others, whereas the proposed simulated annealing algorithms are better than tabu search and genetic algorithms among the iterative metaheuristic algorithms.

Numerosi prodotti di importazione arricchiscono sempre più spesso l’offerta dei media italiani, tv compresa: in questo modo, nel nostro Paese approdano contenuti che non sono pensati e realizzati appositamente per il pubblico nazionale, ma che, una volta trasferiti e adattati, mutano – almeno in parte – la loro forma. In ambito televisivo, un caso particolarmente interessante è quello della situation comedy americana: un genere centrale nella tv statunitense, ma che in Italia è insieme molto diffuso nei palinsesti e spesso frainteso, complesso da tradurre e talvolta ricostruito – o persino stravolto –, disprezzato ma visto (e rivisto) da intere generazioni di spettatori. Questo volume pone le basi teoriche per uno stu dio dei processi di ‘mediazione’, solo apparentemente banali, che intercorrono nel passaggio di un prodotto mediale da un Paese all’altro: l’appropriazione nazionale (o ‘italianizzazione’), la traduzione, l’adattamento, la distribuzione. E poi applica queste basi a un’approfondita analisi delle vicende italiane della sitcom americana, e di alcuni suoi titoli in particolare (Seinfeld, Friends, Will & Grace, How I Met Your Mother), da tre punti di vista: la ricostruzione della sto ria del genere nel nostro Paese; la rassegna delle variazioni e modifiche traduttive che il prodotto televisivo si trova necessariamente ad affrontare; infine, il racconto della sua filiera produttiva e distributiva, delle routine traduttive e dei professionisti coinvolti. Per capire cosa cambia nella sitcom quando passa dagli Stati Uniti all’Italia, e perché.

Catalogs play an important role in distributed systems and especially in Grids where they store necessary user, middleware and system information. In the (first) EU-funded Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project's Grid middleware stack (called gLite), the Grid catalogs follow a Service Oriented Architecture, exposing a set of Web Service interfaces that may be combined and reused by higher-level services or applications. The functional decomposition of the interfaces was driven by the requirements on scalability, robustness, wide-area distribution and security. It is especially important to be able to evolve and extend the interfaces. We describe the requirements of the EGEE applications with respect to catalogs, the architecture of the interfaces and the performance of the gLite implementation.

Reviews the nature of Programmes and delay analysis within the context of Construction Law; considers and compares the contractual provisions in the various standard forms of contract as used for complex construction projects in England and Wales; compares these with other jurisdictions and industries. Concludes with an account of what is missing and what might be provided.

In recent years a number of studies have attempted to rank drugs by a single measure of harmfulness as the basis for decisions about scheduling and classification. These efforts are fundamentally flawed, both conceptually and methodologically. The effort to provide a single measure masks the variety of non-comparable dimensions that are relevant, the fact that benefits are ignored for most, but not all, drugs and that the harms of a drug are not invariant to the policy regime chosen. Methodologically, the most prominent recent effort ignores drug interactions and mixes aggregate and individual harms inappropriately. Instead we suggest that multiple dimensions of harm need to be displayed to inform human judgments of what drugs should be scheduled. Harm is not usefully reducible to a single dimension, and even perfect rankings would not constitute a 'sufficient statistic' for determining scheduling decisions.a dd_3461 1886..1890

We study a decision problem faced by an energy limited wireless device that operates in discrete time. There is some external arrival to the device's transmit buffer. The possible decisions are: a) to serve some of the buffer content; b) to order a new battery after serving the maximum possible amount that it can; or c) to remain idle so that the battery charge can increase owing to diffusion process (which is possible in some commercially available batteries). We look at open and closed-loop controls of the system. The closed-loop control problem is addressed using the framework of Markov Decision Processes. We consider both finite and infinite horizon discounted costs as well as average cost minimization problems. Without using any second order characteristics, we obtain results that include i) optimality of bang-bang control, ii) the optimality of threshold based policies, iii) parametric monotonicity of the threshold, and iv) uniqueness of the threshold. For the open-loop control setting we use recent advances in application of multimodular functions to establish optimality of bracket sequence based control.

We study how changes to the composition and employment of the US Navy combat logistic force (CLF) influence our ability to supply our navy worldwide. The CLF consists of about 30 special transport ships that carry ship and aircraft fuel, ordnance, dry stores, and food, and deliver these to client combatant ships underway, making it possible for our naval forces to operate at sea for extended periods. We have modeled CLF operations to evaluate a number of transforming initiatives that simplify its operation while supporting an even larger number of client ships for a greater variety of missions. Our input is an employment schedule for navy battle groups of ships operating worldwide, extending over a planning horizon of 90-180 days. We show how we use optimization to advise how to sustain these ships. We have used this model to evaluate new CLF ship designs, advise what number of ships in a new ship class would be needed, test concepts for forward at-sea logistics bases in lieu of conventional ports, demonstrate the effects of changes to operating policy, and generally try to show whether and how the CLF can support planned naval operations.

This study is motivated by the unexpected failure of a network-based system during the performance of corrective maintenance. This incident highlights the importance of incorporating network connectivity analysis in maintenance planning. This study shows that it is crucial to consider network connectivity when planning maintenance. Procedures to conduct maintenance planning with network connectivity consideration is proposed and discussed

This paper reports on the development of an automated planning and scheduling system supporting terminal operations of the vehicle transshipment hub in Bremerhaven. We describe terminal operations and derive an integral decision model for manpower planning and inventory control. Thereby we propose a hierarchical separation of the integral model into sub-models and develop heuristics to solve the arising sub-problems.

This paper presents and illustrates a reliability analysis method developed with a focus on Controller-Area-Network-based automotive systems. The method considers the effect of faults on schedulability analysis and its impact on the reliability estimation of the system, and attempts to integrate both to aid system developers. We illustrate the method by modeling a simple distributed antilock braking system, and showing that even in cases where the worst case analysis deems the system unschedulable, it may be proven to satisfy its timing requirements with a sufficiently high probability. From a reliability and cost perspective, this paper underlines the tradeoffs between timing guarantees, the level of hardware and software faults, and per-unit cost.

The increase in traffic intensity and complexity of the railway system demands new methods for real-time traffic control. This paper introduces the architecture, the approach and the current implementation of an advanced Traffic Management System (TMS) able to optimise traffic fluency in large railway networks equipped with either fixed or moving block signalling systems.The TMS takes into account both the actual position and speed of each train in the area and the actual status of the infrastructure, and the dynamic characteristics of the train and the characteristics of the infrastructure such gradients, admissible speeds, signal positions and signal patterns.Potential conflicts can be predicted in advance and solved in real time, by managing the order of trains, or using alternative routes if possible, and by issuing proper speed recommendations to train drivers. In this way, the TMS prevents or limits the number of unplanned stops and the accompanying journey time loss.

We investigate the issues involved in developing a scalable World Wide Web (WWW) server on a cluster of workstations and parallel machines. The objective is to strengthen the processing capabilities of such a server by utilizing the power of multicomputers to match huge demands in simultaneous access requests from the Internet. We have implemented a system called SWEB on a distributed memory machine, the Meiko CS-2, and networked workstations. The scheduling component of the system actively monitors the usages of CPU, I/O channels and the interconnection network to effectively distribute HTTP requests across processing units to exploit task and I/O parallelism. We present the experimental results on the performance of this system

The instructional scheduling arrangements of simulated and community-based instruction across an equivalent set of functional and vocational skills were examined. Five secondary age students with moderate intellectual disabilities participated in four instructional scheduling arrangements measuring skill acquisition, generalization, and maintenance of functional tasks. The four instructional scheduling arrangements examined were simulated-only instruction (SOI), community-based instruction only (CBI), combination of SOI and CBI on consecutive school days (CCD), and combination of SOI and CBI on the same school day (CSD). The CSD schedule was significantly more effective for student acquisition performance than SOI, CBI, and CCD schedules. Although the CBI schedule resulted in the fewest number of instructional sessions for students to acquire the targeted skill, fewer sessions for skill generalization were required for students during the combined simulation and community instruction CSD schedule. Overall, both combined instructional scheduling arrangements (e.g., CCD, CSD) produced more efficient outcomes for generalization than SOI and CBI scheduling arrangements.

Linux has become one of the most popular UNIX operating systems. Commercial support for Linux and adoption of Linux in real world applications have n o w started to emerge. Some of the applications have strict real-time requirements. In this paper, we discuss how to make Linux a real-time operating system. The realtime capability i s a c hieved by three new kernel mechanisms. We port a microtimer into the kernel. We adopt the time-driven scheduling paradigm and implement a time-driven scheduler in the Linux kernel. Finally, we insert preemption points in the kernel to make it more preemptable so that real-time jobs may experience shorter blockings. Our approach is general and may be used to enhance the real-time capability of other non-real-time operating systems as well.

In this paper we present new methods for the automated learning of heuristics in knowledge-lean applications and for finding heuristics that can be generalized to unlearned domains. These applications lack domain knowledge for credit assignment; hence, operators for composing new heuristics areg enerally modelfree, domain independent, and syntactic in nature. The operators we have used areg enetics-based; examples of which include mutation and cross-over. Learning is based on a generate-and-test paradigm that maintains a pool of competing heuristics, tests them to a limited extent, creates new ones from those that perform well in the past, and prunes poor ones from the pool. We hav e studied three important issues in learning better heuristics: (a) anomalies in performance evaluation, (b) rational scheduling of limited computational resources in testing candidate heuristics in single-objective asw ell as multiobjective learning, and (c) finding heuristics that can be generalized to unlearned domains. We showexperimental results in learning better heuristics for (a) process placement for distributed-memory multicomputers, (b) node decomposition in a branch-and-bound search, (c) generation of test patterns in VLSI circuit testing, and (d) VLSI cell placement and routing.

We report on a case study to assess the use of an advanced knowledge-based software design technique with programmers who have not participatedin the technique's development. We use the KIDS approach to algorithm design to construct two global search algorithms that route baggage through a transportation net. Construction of the second algorithm involves extending the KIDS knowledge base. Experience with the case study leads us to integrate the approach with the spiral and prototyping models of software engineering, and to discuss ways to deal with incomplete design knowledge.

The IEEE 802.16 Working Group on Broadband Wireless Access is developing the standard for broadband wireless access networks in Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), also know as WiMAX. One of the features of the 802.16 MAC layer is that it is designed to differentiate service among traffic categories with different multimedia requirements. Based on these assumptions and considering that the standard does not specify a scheduling algorithm, an original analytical model was proposed based on Latency-Rate (LR) server theory and system characteristics specified by the standard for systems using the WirelessMAN-OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) air interface. The proposed scheduling algorithm for the uplink traffic guarantees a bounded delay for the IEEE 802.16 and the Time Frame (TF) is calculated to maximize the number of allocated stations taking into account delay bound parameters. We show that it is possible to obtain worst-case performance guarantee on delay. Properties of the proposal are investigated theoretically. We present a set of simulation with both Constant Bit Rate (CBR) and Variable Bit Rate (VBR) flows and performance comparisons among different TFs. The results show that the delay upper bound can be achieved for a large range of networks load with bandwidth optimization.

This work addresses the problem of low power design in high-level synthesis in the scenario of the resources operating at multiple voltages. The problem of resource-and-latency constrained scheduling is tackled and a novel methodology for scheduling as well as design space exploration is proposed. The proposed methodology achieves maximal power reduction of functional units by identifying the maximal parallelism of power hungry operators in resource-constrained/time-constrained designs. A novel scheme is devised for recognizing the ''zones'' of parallel operators that result in maximal power savings when rescheduled to lower voltages. The proposed methodology is developed in the framework of a modified stochastic evolution mechanism in order to tame the computational complexity. The proposed scheduling technique is extremely fast and it runs in Oðn 2 Þ; where n is the number of the nodes in the data flow graph of the design. This is the fastest reported time of scheduling algorithms for resourceand-latency constrained scheduling with resources operating at multiple voltages. The algorithm produces results within accuracy of 3-5% of the integer-linear-programming based (i.e., exponential-timecomplexity) method. The details and the analysis of the results on the standard high-level synthesis benchmarks are provided. Further, analysis of schedules is given for considering generation of control signals for switching the resources. This is the first work to consider such analysis besides proposing an efficient algorithm. r

Deadline-sensitive workflows require careful coordination of user constraints with resource availability. Current distributed resource access models provide varying degrees of resource control: from limited or none in grid batch systems to explicit in cloud systems. Additionally applications experience variability due to competing user loads, performance variations, failures, etc. These variations impact the quality of service (QoS) that goes unaccounted for in planning strategies. In this paper we propose Workflow ORchestrator for Distributed Systems (WORDS) architecture based on a least common denominator resource model that abstracts the differences and captures the QoS properties provided by grid and cloud systems. We investigate algorithms for effective orchestration (i.e., resource procurement and task mapping) for deadline-sensitive workflows atop the resource abstraction provided in WORDS. Our evaluation compares orchestration methodologies over TeraGrid and Amazon EC2 systems. Experimental results show that WORDS enables effective orchestration possible at reasonable costs on batch queue grid and cloud systems with or without explicit resource control.

, namely BIC-aiNet, capable of clustering rows and columns of a data matrix simultaneously. The usefulness and performance of the methodology are reported in the literature. Now, the authors carry out more rigorous comparative experiments with BIC-aiNet and other techniques found in the literature, as well as evaluate the scalability of the algorithm in several datasets of different sizes. The results indicate that our proposal is able to provide useful recommendations for the users, outperforming other methodologies for CF.

[1] studied a proportionate flowshop scheduling problem with general position-dependent processing times. The main result in this paper is correct. However, there is a minor error in the results of the special cases. In this short note, we show counterexamples and then offer new more strict conditions to resolve the special cases.

Linear Programming (LP) is a widely used tool for solving many linear/non-linear power-system optimization problems such as transmission planning, constrainedsecurity dispatch, optimal power flow, emergency control, etc. Variants of simplex-based methodologies are generally used to solve the underlying LP problems. In this paper an implementation of the newly developed Dual Affine (DA) algorithm (a variant of Karmarkar's interior point method) is described in detail and some computational results are presented. This algorithm is particularly suitable for problems with a large number of constraints, and is applicable to linear and nonlinear optimization problems. In contrast with the simplex method, the number of iterations required by the DA algorithm to solve large-scale problems is relatively small, generally between 20 -60, irrespective of problem size; this feature makes the DA method very fast in practical applications. The DA algorithm has been implemented considering the sparsity of the constraint matrix. The normal equation that is required t o be solved in every iteration is solved using a preconditioned conjugate gradient method.

In this paper, a beam search scheduling heuristic (BSSH) is presented to solve the parcel hub scheduling problem (PHSP), which is a scheduling problem that is common in the parcel delivery industry (PDI). Companies in the PDI include the United States Postal Service, United Parcel Services, Federal Express, and Deutsche Post. Together, these companies move more than one trillion dollars of the United States' Gross Domestic Product. The PHSP involves scheduling a set of inbound trailers each containing a set of heterogeneous parcels to a set of unload docks. At the unload docks, the parcels are unloaded, sorted, and moved to the appropriate outbound trailers at the load docks. At the load docks, the parcels are loaded onto the outbound trailers. The objective is to minimize the timespan of the transfer operation at the transshipment terminal. The BSSH is compared to various scheduling approaches: random scheduling algorithm (RSA), genetic-based scheduling algorithm (GBSA), and simulation-based scheduling algorithm (SBSA). While GBSA and SBSA offer solutions that are superior to BSSH for smaller size problems, BSSH outperforms these algorithms on larger size problems requiring much less computational time. The results show that for larger size problems the BSSH is able to produce solutions that are from 4% to 8% of the known optimum solutions. In contrast, GBSA and SBSA, respectively offer solutions from 23% to 38% and from 6% to 47% of the known optimum solutions. The contribution of this paper is a scheduling heuristic to solve the PHSP.

We are interested in coloring the edges of a mixed graph, i.e., a graph containing unoriented and oriented edges. This problem is related to a communication problem in job-shop scheduling systems. In this paper we give general bounds on the number of required colors and analyze the complexity status of this problem. In particular, we provide N Pcompleteness results for the case of outerplanar graphs, as well as for 3-regular bipartite graphs (even when only 3 colors are allowed, or when 5 colors are allowed and the graph is fully oriented). Special cases admitting polynomial-time solutions are also discussed.

One hundred thirty-eight subjects participated in a study on mobile appointment scheduling. Subjects completed a questionnaire on their primary method of managing appointments when away from their desks. Immediately afterwards, subjects completed a session of scheduling four appointments with the interviewer. The most common scheduling systems, in order of popularity, were paper-based day planners, memory, scrap paper, and PDA's. However, 43% of the claimed PDA users and 68% of day planner users switched to another, more readily accessible method when scheduling an appointment. Interviews revealed a practice of using memory or scrap paper to "buffer" appointments for later entry into the PDA or planner.

Reduction of waiting time of patients and idle time of doctors is one of the most important factors of outpatient ward management. Although conventional in-hospital outpatient navigation and re-scheduling systems free the patients from waiting rooms, the systems often cause additional idle times for the doctors and even several clinical incidents. This paper designed a new patient navigation and re-scheduling system equips position tracking. The authors introduced the system into Kyoto University Hospital. As a result, the system decreased more than 100 hours a day of wasted time and irritations of the patients and the clinical staffs. The results tell that the context-aware feature makes not only the system user friendly but also the users friendly.

Scope and Purpose-This paper addresses the problem of assigning a constant flow allowance (CON) due-date and sequencing a given set of jobs on a single machine in order lo minimize a linear function of the deviations of job completion times from the due-date. This approach, consistent with the philosophy of just-in-time production, penalizes both job earliness and job tardiness. The goal is to identify effective solution strategies, exact as well as heuristic, for the problem.

We consider a scheduling problem in which a bounded number of jobs can be processed simultaneously by a single machine. The input is a set of n jobs J = {J 1 , . . . , J n }. Each job, J j , is associated with an interval [s j , c j ] along which it should be processed. Also given is the parallelism parameter g ≥ 1, which is the maximal number of jobs that can be processed simultaneously by a single machine. Each machine operates along a contiguous time interval, called its busy interval, which contains all the intervals corresponding to the jobs it processes. The goal is to assign the jobs to machines such that the total busy time of the machines is minimized.

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.

Scheduling dependent tasks is one of the most challenging problems in parallel and distributed systems. It is known to be computationally intractable in its general form as well as several restricted cases. An interesting application of scheduling is in the area of energy awareness for mobile battery operated devices where minimizing the energy utilized is the most important scheduling policy consideration. A number of heuristics have been developed for this consideration. In this paper, we study the scheduling problem for a particular battery model. In the proposed work, we show how to enhance a well know approach of accounting for the slack generated at runtime due to the difference between WCET (Worst Case Execution Time) and AET (Actual Execution Time). Our solution exploits the fact that even though some tasks become available based on the actual periodicity of a task they are not executed because the run queue is determined by the schedule generated in the offline phase I of the algorithm using the conservative EDF (Earliest Deadline First) algorithm. We peek at the task run-queue to find such tasks to eliminate wastage of the slack generated. Based on the outcome of the conducted experiments, the proposed algorithm outperformed or matched the performance of the 2-Phase dynamic task scheduling algorithm all the time.

The selection and scheduling of a portfolio of projects is a task frequently found among the strategical activities performed by management staff in several industries. When choosing a project to be selected and scheduled into a portfolio, managers have to deal with conflicting criteria, resource constraints, distinct scenarios, and changes during the planning and execution phases. In this work, we describe the functionalities of a decision support system (DSS) prototype designed to help managers make better decisions, when constructing a portfolio of projects. The DSS software was developed to solve portfolio selection problems originating at a large corporation in the power generation industry. It implements a heuristic algorithm, which finds solutions at least 10% better than a manually produced solution for a real-world input instance.

During the last decade, the technologies related to electric vehicles (EVs) have captured both scientific and industrial interest. Specifically, the subject of the smart charging of EVs has gained significant attention, as it facilitates the managed charging of EVs to reduce disturbances to the power grid. Despite the presence of an extended literature on the topic, the implementation of a framework that allows flexibility in the definition of the decision-making objectives, along with user-defined criteria is still a challenge. Towards addressing this challenge, a framework for the smart charging of EVs is presented in this paper. The framework consists of a heuristic algorithm that facilitates the charge scheduling within a charging station (CS), and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to support the driver of the EV selecting the most appropriate charging station based on their needs of transportation and personal preferences. The communications are facilitated by the Open Platform Communications-Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) standard. For the selection of the scheduling algorithm, the genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimisation have been evaluated, where the latter had better performance. The performance of the charge scheduling is evaluated, in various charging tasks, compared to the exhaustive search for small problems.

In this paper, we study the performance of the cumulative Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) in IEEE 802.16 networks. An analytical model is developed to investigate some important performance metrics, such as protocol data unit (PDU) delivery delay, service data unit (SDU) delivery delay, and goodput. A general scheduling scheme and the flexible retransmission of lost PDUs are jointly considered in the analytical model, which provides a more valuable and practical guideline for the system design and performance evaluation. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the impacts of different operational parameters on the performance metrics and verify the accuracy of the analytical model.

We consider the complexity of the traveling tournament problem, which is a well-known benchmark problem in tournament timetabling. The problem was supposed to be computationally hard ever since its proposal in 2001. Recently, the first NP-completeness proof has been given for the variant of the problem were no constraints on the number of consecutive home games or away games of a team are considered. The complexity of the original traveling tournament problem including these constraints, however, is still open. In this paper, we show that this variant of the problem is strongly NP-complete when the upper bound on the maximal number of consecutive away games is set to 3.

Register files are becoming one of the critical components of current out-of-order processors in terms of delay and power consumption, since their potential to exploit instruction-level parallelism is quite related to the size and number of ports of the register file. In conventional register renaming schemes, register releasing is conservatively done only after the instruction that redefines the same register is committed. Instead, we propose a scheme that releases registers as soon as the processor knows that there will be no further use of them. We present two earlyreleasing hardware implementations with different performance/complexity trade-offs. Detailed cycle-level simulations show either a significant speedup for a given register file size, or a reduction in register file size for a given performance level.

This paper presents a practical Method for characterising, modelling and solving scheduling problems using a heuristic approach. The emphasis is on a heuristic methodology which has been adopted in developing the TRANSIM nurse allocation system. TRANSIM has been used in designing schedules in various schools of nursing in England and Australia. The methodology can be adopted for the purpose of automated scheduling in a variety of management and engineering applications.

Focusing on a basic printed circuit board (PCB) assembly line configuration characterized by very long setup times, we examine two scheduling methods that can significantly reduce the setup. Both methods-the Grouped SetUp (GSU) method that has been recently introduced in the literature and the Sequence Dependent Scheduling (SDS) method, which has not been studied in this context-are based on component commonality among PCB types. Using the typical traditional scheduling method as a benchmark, the GSU and the SDS methods are compared in terms of three performance measures: line throughput, average work-in-process (WIP) inventory level, and implementation complexity. Guide lines for selecting the most appropriate method for a given production environment are proposed. The analysis is illustrated using real data from a typical production line.

АННОТАЦИЯ Актуальность. Составление расписания учебных занятий является одной из важнейших задач управления учебным процессом. Рост требований к качеству обучения, сокращение материальной базы и увеличение количества специальностей приводят к необходимости оптимизации процесса использования кадрового потенциала, аудиторного фонда и экономии энергетических ресурсов. Поскольку все факторы, влияющие на расписание, практически невозможно учесть, а интересы участников учебного процесса многообразны, задача составления расписания является многокритериальной с нечетким множеством факторов. В связи с этим проблема автоматизации составления расписаний учебных занятий в образователь-ных системах по-прежнему остается одной из актуальных проблем организации учебного процесса. Цель. Повышение качества расписания занятий университета и уменьшение времени его составления. Качество распи-сания определяется тем насколько соблюдаются необходимые и желательные требования к нему. Необходимо предусмотреть возможность расширения желательных требований без изменения оптимизирующего механизма. Метод. Для описания процессов составления расписания занятий применена методология конструктивно-продукционного моделирования. С точки зрения конструктивизма: на основе ряда конструкций с заданной структурой и содержанием необходимо завершить конструирование расписания с заданной структурой и частично содержанием. Разработка конструктора предусматривает определение расширяемого носителя, сигнатуры отношений и операций, а также информационного обеспечения. Наиболее сложной и существенной частью является создание множества правил подстановки, определяющих процесс вывода соответствующих конструкций. Результаты. Разработан конструктор составления расписания занятий и программное обеспечение, реализующее предложенный метод. Выводы. Проведенные эксперименты подтвердили эффективность предложенного подхода и программного обеспечения, реализующие предложенный метод. Это позволяет рекомендовать его для использования на практике при решении задач составления расписания занятий.

This article addresses the effects of 3-tiered comprehensive reading and behavior interventions on K-3 student outcomes in 7 urban elementary schools with a high prevalence of students considered difficult to teach. Specific features of each level of the implementation are described including screening and tier placement procedures, scheduling and personnel supports, procedures for ensuring strong implementation with fidelity, procedures for student progress monitoring, and guidelines for instructional decision making. Early literacy skill outcomes for students were the primary dependent measures in reading; schoolwide office discipline referral rate was the dependent measure in behavior. Significant improvement was evident in phoneme segmentation and nonsense word fluency in reading and significant decreases were documented in office discipline referrals across treatment and comparison schools. Significantly higher outcomes were also recorded on required statewide end-of-grade asse...

The impact schedule can represent delays, disruptions, or both. It is incumbent on the claims preparer to make that distinction. An impact schedule is predicated on a series or succession of events that are expected to increase overall duration or the critical path. In some cases the impact schedule reflects a reduction in overall duration. Such a document may accompany a claim for early completion, which may be compensable.