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Reviewer: Minette Carl

Even before the Second World War, modern optimization techniques were used to solve scheduling problems; since then, the field has branched out so much that any given text has to concentrate on certain aspects of scheduling as opposed to attempting an encyclopedic approach. This is important for students and academics to realize, especially when reading a text on scheduling such as this. Commendably, the authors are open and intellectually honest about this situation. The book contains 18 chapters and three appendices. Chapter 1 introduces sequencing and scheduling, and the authors state their philosophical approach to the field. Chapters 2 to 7 concentrate on scheduling and sequencing tasks on a single machine. On a single machine, a sequencing problem has a number of constraints: a machine can process only one job at a time; initial setup time is included in the overall processing time, which is known ahead of time; and, once a task has started, it will proceed without interruption. These chapters focus on problem definition; optimization methods; heuristics; lateness penalties; stochastic models where processing times are nondeterministic and, therefore, not known in advance; and time safety for single-machine scheduling, respectively. Chapter 8 explores extensions of the basic model. Safe scheduling, which is introduced in chapter 7, continues in chapter 9, for parallel processing machines. The authors argue that just as stockpiling can be critical to practical inventory policies, maintaining a safety time buffer is necessary for issuing practical schedules. In fact, the authors have also published an important paper on this topic [1]. The makespan is an important metric used for analyzing schedules. The makespan of a schedule is the maximum (total) execution time that any critical path of the schedule must take. Therefore, the objective of scheduling is to minimize the makespan over all possible schedules. This metric is used in chapters 10 to 12, which deal with flow shop scheduling. Flow shop scheduling involves scheduling over multiple processors, where each job has a number of operations that must be executed in a specific order and typically cannot be split up. Lot streaming procedures divide the subtasks that comprise the job into groups with overlapping processing times. Chapter 10 presents the essential problem, chapter 11 considers the stochastic variant, and chapter 12 analyzes lot streaming procedures. Chapters 13 to 15 deal with scheduling groups of jobs, and chapters 16 to 18 provide practical considerations for project scheduling. Of these six chapters, chapter 16 deserves mentioning because it introduces the critical path method (CPM) and the program evaluation and review technique (PERT). While consulting managers in all areas of project scheduling heavily use these concepts, they are especially important to software engineers. The three appendices are dedicated to special statistical and stochastic constructs: Appendix A covers various distributions, Appendix B covers probability models, and Appendix C covers integer programming methods. This well-written and readable book presents important information on the selected problems. Students, academics, and practitioners will find this up-to-date text full of important information on efficient scheduling. Online Computing Reviews Service