Scheduling with Testing
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Author(s)
Levi, Retsef
Magnanti, Thomas L
Shaposhnik, Yaron
Date Issued
February 2019
Journal
Management Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Levi, Retsef et al. “Scheduling with Testing.” Management Science 65, 2 (February 2019): v-vi, 459-954 © 2018 INFORMS
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We study a new class of scheduling problems that capture common settings in service environments, in which one has to serve a collection of jobs that have a priori uncertain attributes (e.g., processing times and priorities) and the service provider has to decide how to dynamically allocate resources (e.g., people, equipment, and time) between testing (diagnosing) jobs to learn more about their respective uncertain attributes and processing jobs. The former could inform future decisions, but could delay the service time for other jobs, while the latter directly advances the processing of the jobs but requires making decisions under uncertainty. Through novel analysis we obtain surprising structural results of optimal policies that provide operational managerial insights, efficient optimal and near-optimal algorithms, and quantification of the value of testing. We believe that our approach will lead to further research to explore this important practical trade-off.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2973
