Special issue on scheduling in batch-processing industries and supply chains

摘要

Scheduling research involving batching considerations has attracted the attention of many researchers and practitioners in the past decade. The importance and popularity of batch-scheduling research are not only due to its theoretical interest and challenges, but also due to its practical applicability. Nowadays, scheduling involving batching is commonplace in manufacturing and servicing operations, transportation and storage, military operations, and large-scale economic projects, among others. The chief motivation for batching jobs is to enhance efficiency: it is often cheaper and faster to process jobs in a batch than to process them individually.