Scheduling with stochastic approaches

This chapter surveys the literature on scheduling problems with random attributes, including processing times, due dates, and patterns of machine breakdowns, for which the approaches for deterministic scheduling are no longer applicable or have to be modified. Wefirst consider problems under regular objective functions, which are non- decreasing in job completion times. We then move on to non-regular objective func- tions such as expected weighted earliness/tardiness, as well as more general cost func- tions. The scheduling problems and methods developed for regular and non-regular objective functions are extended to the situation where the machine to process the jobs is subject to stochastic breakdowns.