THE DISTRIBUTION-FREE JOB CONTROL PROBLEM

The job control problem is to determine an optimal release time where the flow time is a random variable with a known probability distributi on. There is a trade-off between the penalty cost for late delivery an d the holding cost for early finish. C. Liao [Computers Br Industrial Engineering, 22, 163-169 (1992)] formulated this problem and provided a practical decision procedure. This paper addresses the job control p roblem where only the mean and the variance of the flow time are known . The motivation of this paper comes from the fact that the distributi onal information on the flow time is usually limited for some job shop s. We provide a simple line search algorithm to find a job release tim e which can be used in the absence of the distributional information. Copyright (C) 1991 Elsevier Science Ltd