Measures of problem uncertainty for total weighted flow time scheduling on a single machine

Abstract

A single-machine scheduling problem is investigated under the assumption that the processing time of a job can take any real value from a given closed interval. The criterion is to minimize the total weighted completion time for a set of given jobs. As a measure of uncertainty for such a scheduling problem, it is reasonable to consider the cardinality of a minimal dominant set of job permutations containing an optimal permutation for each possible realization of the job processing times. We show that a minimal dominant set may be uniquely determined and demonstrate how to select a suitable solution method for the individual problem using the value of an uncertainty measure.