A two-agent resource allocation scheduling problem with slack due-date assignment and general deterioration function

In order to increase the efficiency of production in a deteriorating environment through competition amongst the individual agents, this study explores a two-agent scheduling problem with one deterioration rate for each job, where the processing time of a job is a function of the position-dependent workload, resource allocation, and deterioration rate (the range of the deterioration rate is non-negative). The optimal processing sequence and resource allocation for the jobs are found by giving an upper bound of an agent to minimize the maximum value of earliness, tardiness and decision variable of another agent under slack due-date assignment. It is verified that the problem cannot be solved in polynomial time, for which various heuristic algorithms and a branch-and-bound algorithm are proposed to simulate the data to find a better range in the deterioration rate parameter.