Algorithmic approaches to preselective strategies for stochastic scheduling problems

This article deals with a fairly general model of stochastic scheduling problems, for which the class of preselective strategies was recently introduced. This class proved to be of considerable importance, one of the reasons being that it forms, in a certain sense, the greatest class of strategies leading to a certain stability behavior. Furthermore, this uncountably infinite class is essentially determined by a finite number of well-behaving <-minimal strategies, viz. special so-called MES or s-induced strategies. This fact is used in the present article to show how MES strategies can be treated algo-rithmically. The approach used is an implicit enumeration scheme, based on a branch-and-bound method; this is illustrated in a fair number of examples.