Abstract
This study considers a typical scheduling environment that is influenced by the behavioral phenomenon of multitasking. Under multitasking, the processing of a selected job suffers from interruption by other jobs that are available but unfinished. This situation arises in a wide variety of applications; for example, administration, manufacturing, and process and project management. Several classical solution methods for scheduling problems no longer apply in the presence of multitasking. The solvability of any scheduling problem under multitasking is no easier than that of the corresponding classical problem. We develop optimal algorithms for some fundamental and practical single machine scheduling problems with multitasking. For other problems, we show that they are computationally intractable, even though in some cases the corresponding problem in classical scheduling is efficiently solvable. We also study the cost increase and value gained due to multitasking. This analysis informs companies about how much it would be worthwhile to invest in measures to reduce or encourage multitasking. © 2014 Production and Operations Management Society.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1248-1265 |
| Journal | Production and Operations Management |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Aug 2015 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publication details (e.g. title, author(s), publication statuses and dates) are captured on an “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” basis at the time of record harvesting from the data source. Suggestions for further amendments or supplementary information can be sent to [email protected].Funding
The authors thank Professor Chelliah Sriskandarajah (the department editor), the senior editor, and the referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. Helpful comments on an earlier draft were also provided by Zhixin Liu (University of Michigan‐Dearborn) and Hairong Zhao (Purdue University Calumet). This work is supported in part by the Summer Fellowship Program, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, to the first author; in part by National Science Foundation grant CMMI‐0969830, to the second author; and in part by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong under grant PolyU5195/13E, to the third author.
Research Keywords
- cost and value of multitasking
- multitasking
- polynomial time algorithm
- scheduling
