Announcement: Ph.D thesis on stochastic scheduling

[Mikkel Thomas Jensen <mjensen@daimi.au.dk>]

I am very pleased to announce the availability of my Ph.D-thesis

"Robust and Flexible Scheduling with Evolutionary Computation"

The primary topic of the thesis is the development and testing of new
methods for robust and flexible job shop scheduling in stochastic
environments. Two fundamentally different approaches in this area of
research are presented.

The neighbourhood based robustness approach is demonstrated to
decrease the average cost of job shops facing breakdowns, when
disruptions in the form of machine breakdowns are encountered. This
result holds for a number of different rescheduling methods and
performance criteria of the job shop. The approach is found to match
the performance of a state-of-the-art method, but to have a wider
range of applicability.

A coevolutionary approach to generate schedules guaranteeing some
level of performance for schedules facing breakdowns is developed and
tested. The algorithm finds schedules guaranteeing a specific level of
worst case performance for makespan schedules facing a set of possible
future disruptions. The approach is demonstrated to significantly
decrease worst case costs when compared to standard scheduling. It is
also demonstrated to work for worst deviation performance scheduling.

Other contributions include a new coevolutionary algorithm for minimax
problems. The new algorithm is capable of solving problems with an
asymmetric property that causes previously published algorithms to
fail. Also, a new algorithm to solve the economic lot and delivery
scheduling problem is presented. The new algorithm is guaranteed to
solve the problem to optimality in polynomial time, something
previously published algorithms have not been able to do.

The thesis can be downloaded from
http://www.daimi.au.dk/~mjensen/research/research.html

All the best,
Mikkel

==================================
 Mikkel T. Jensen,      
 Department of Computer Science,
 University of Aarhus, Denmark
 email:mjensen@daimi.au.dk
 http://www.daimi.au.dk/~mjensen/
==================================