ABSTRACT
If the theory of scheduling were simply concerned with the efficient reading of newspapers, no one would study it. I began with that example so that you might meet and attempt to solve a scheduling problem unhindered by the definitions and notations that are usually required and are introduced in this chapter. The terminology of scheduling theory arose in the processing and manufacturing industries. Therefore we will be talking about jobs and machines, even though in some cases the objects referred to bear little relation to either jobs or machines. For instance, in the example of the last section we will see that Albert, Bertrand, Charles, and Daniel are ‘jobs,’ while the newspapers are ‘machines.’ We begin by defining the general job shop problem. We will show that its structure fits many scheduling problems arising in business, computing, government, and the social services as well as those in industry.
