Single machine scheduling with controllable processing times: A parametric study

Most scheduling research has treated individual job processing times as fixed parameters. In many practical situations, however, jobs can be compressed at extra cost through the allocation of a limited resource. This paper considers the problem of minimizing the total job processing cost plus the average flow cost. The tolerance ranges of job processing times are determined so that the optimal sequence remains unchanged. An application of such sequence-independent tolerance ranges is presented to demonstrate their potential usefulness in practice.