The enduring repercussions of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the worsening global economy following the burst of the dotcom bubbles in 2001, the financial tsunami in 2008, and the incessant rise in customer demand for better services have all contributed to shrinking profit margins for businesses around the world. To cope with these challenges, firms are discovering logistics as a competitive weapon when looking for ways to strengthen and preserve their market positions. One successfu...

This book provides an introduction to the models, methods, and results of some due date-related scheduling problems in the field of multiagent scheduling. In multiagent scheduling, two or more agents share a common processing resource and each agent wants to optimize its own objective function with respect to its own set of jobs. Since the agents have conflicting objective functions, they have to negotiate among themselves with regard to sharing the common resource to optimize their own ob...