In this paper, we study the problem of sequencing and scheduling N customers for a single-server system. The goal is to balance the expected customer flow times and the expected system completion time. Customers are scheduled to enter the system by appointments only and the service times are exponentially distributed with different rates. The optimization of such a system involves determining the customer service order (sequencing) and the interarrival times (scheduling). We show that the service order depends upon the order of service rates and the optimal schedule can be obtained by solving a set of nonlinear equations. Numerical examples are used to illustrate the method.
