Improving Service through Just-in-Time Concept in a Dynamic Operational Environment

This paper is concerned with the problem of Just-In-Time (JIT) job scheduling in a dynamic environment under uncertainty to attain timely service. We provide an approach, based on robust scheduling concepts, to analytically evaluate the expected cost of earliness and tardiness for each job and also the project. In addition, we search for a schedule execution policy with the minimum robust cost such that for a given risk level ε, the actual realized schedule has (1 - ε) probability of completing with less than or equal to this robust cost. Our method is quite generic, and can be applied to JIT scheduling of jobs in a service company where earliness and tardiness are critical concerns.