On the scheduling of alternative stochastic jobs on a single machine

Standard models in stochastic resource allocation concern the economic processing of all jobs in some set J. We consider a set up in which tasks in various subsets of J are deemed to be alternative to one another, in that only one member of such a subset of alternative tasks will be completed during the evolution of the process. Existing stochastic scheduling methodology for single-machine problems is developed and extended to this novel class of models. A major area of application is in research planning.