European Journal of Operational Research 167 (2005) 589591

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Editorial

Multicriteria scheduling

Scheduling theory dates back to the early of the

1950s and denes itself as a part of Operations Research. 1 Since then, the tackled models have
evolved and became more and more complex,
somewhere, closer to those appearing in industries
and service societies. This evolution has been possible thanks to the solution of simple, basic, single
criterion models. For instance, it is clear that a lot
of single machine models tackled up to the 1980s
now serve as basic models for the solution of more
complex problems. A cursory glance at the literature dedicated to scheduling shows that complex
problems usually refers to problems where the resources or jobs conguration is complex. Henceforth, this complexity has been considered,
roughly speaking, more related to the structure
of the problem than to the criteria to optimise.
Does it mean that considering several criteria to
optimise is out of interest or makes the problem
easier (so that it turns out of interest)? The answer
to this question is clearly no for both practical and
theoretical considerations. In the industries and
service societies more than one criteria are often
considered. Besides, the optimisation of conicting criteria introduces some uncertainty, since
some schedules become incomparable. And the

To the best of our knowledge the rst paper on scheduling

has been published by S.M. Johnson in 1954 (and wrote in
1953) on the two machine owshop problem with minimization
of the makespan. In the early of the 1900s, Henry Gantt
introduced the so-called Ganttt chart.

challenging issue turns out to calculate the most

interesting incomparable schedules, namely the
Pareto 2 optima. This task is not as simple as
optimising a single criterion. Thus, the criteria imply more complexity in the goal of the optimisation, i.e. what we have to calculate. They also
change the problems to solve and sometimes lead
to reduce them to known single criteria scheduling
problems. For instance, to calculate a Pareto optimum for a bicriteria problem, we often minimise
the rst criterion subject to an additional constraint that the second criterion is upper bounded
by a given value. If the second criterion is a classic
regular max function, like the makespan, the maximum tardiness, etc., then the additional constraint
is equivalent to the existence of deadlines on the
last operation of jobs. And in the basic case of
single machine problems, this means that the calculation of a Pareto optimum can be reduced to a
single criterion problem with deadlines. But more
2
Vilfredo Pareto (18481923) was an Italian economist. He
wrote in 1896 and 1897 a three-volume edition of his lecture
notes, Cours d economie politique, and in 1906 the Manual of
political Economy in which he introduced the Pareto optimality.
This notion was introduced as follows: We will say that the
members of a collectivity enjoy maximum ophelimity in a
certain position when it is impossible to nd a way of moving
from that position very slightly in such a manner that the
ophelimity enjoyed by each of the individuals of that collectivity
increases or decreases. That is to say, any small displacement in
departing from that position necessarily has the eect of
increasing the ophelimity which certain individuals enjoy, and
decreasing that which others enjoy, of being agreeable to some,
and disagreeable to others.

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Editorial / European Journal of Operational Research 167 (2005) 589591

often we cannot derive such result and the additional constraint is not so easy to deal with (for
instance if the bounded criterion is a sum criterion).
So, generally, the optimisation of multiple criteria
does not tend to simplify scheduling problems.
And to our opinion, if the complexity introduced in scheduling problems has been more related to the resources or jobs conguration it is
maybe because we do not know how to optimise
the criteria, and what it means. Since the 1960s,
numerous works have been achieved in the eld
of multicriteria optimisation. 3 The early works
were dedicated to continuous linear problems
for which various generalisations of the Simplex
method were set up to enumerate the extreme Pareto optimal points. 4 Since then, multicriteria combinatorial optimisation problems have been solved
and synthesis books or papers containing answers
to the question How to optimise multiple criteria? have been published. 5 These answers highlight the fact that the Decision Maker is more
involved in the solution process than when optimising a single criterion, since he/she is the only one
who is capable of breaking the incomparability
of Pareto optima. From a technical viewpoint,
we can retrieve from multicriteria optimisation
eld results and methods for calculating a single
strict Pareto optimum. We can also retrieve applications to basic Operations Research problems
with multiple criteria, like the knapsack problem,
the shortest path problem or the assignment problem. There are a lot of things to learn from multicriteria optimisation eld.
Multicriteria scheduling has really received
attention in the 1980s and later, but surprisingly
the rst paper which dealt with the calculation of
a Pareto optimum was a paper written by Smith
3

See the numerous papers published in the eld of MultiCriteria Decision Making (MCDM).
4
See the seminal book of R. Steuer (1986): Multiple Criteria
Optimization: Theory, Computation and Application, John
Wiley, New York, USA.
5
See among others the paper of G.W. Evans (1984): An
overview of techniques for solving multiobjective mathematical
programs, Management Science 30(11), 12681282. See also the
book of M. Ehrgott (2000): Multicriteria Optimization, Lecture
Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, SpringerVerlag, for more technical and recent insights.

in 1956. 6 Since then, multicriteria scheduling has

evolved from single machine models to shop and
parallel machine problems, and beyond. 7 And
since the end of the 1990s results from multicriteria
optimisation eld have been considered when solving multicriteria scheduling problems. The opportunity has been given to us by Pr. Teghem to
organize a feature issue of the European Journal
of Operational Research on scheduling with multiple objectives. When writing the rst Call for
Papers we mentioned as topics for this issue the
major scheduling models which involve multiple
objectives, which covers a broad research area in
scheduling. From classic models, to those involving controllable processing times and those involving Just-in-Time criteria. The papers published in
this feature issue are representative of this diversity
and the papers usually dealing with multicriteria
scheduling. Papers have been seriously reviewed
and only around 50% of the submitted papers
are included in this feature issue. We would like
to thank all the referees for their contribution to
this feature issue: H. Aigbedo (Rochester, USA),
A. Artiba (Mons, Belgium), P. Baptiste (Palaiseau,
France), R. Buln (Auburn, USA), L. Buriol
(Campinas, Brazil), J. Carlier (Compie`gne,
France), C.-L. Chen (College Park, USA), T.C.E.
Cheng (Hong Kong, China), R. Deckro (Hobson
Way, USA), F. Della Croce (Torino, Italy), M.
Ehrgott (Auckland, New Zealand), G. Geiger
(Muenchen, Germany), J. Haddock (New York,
USA), J. Hasenbein (Austin, USA), W. Herroelen
(Leuven, Belgium), H.-H. Huang (Pingtung, Taiwan), A. Janiak (Wroclaw, Poland), A. Jaszkiewicz (Poznan, Poland), W. Kubiak (St Johns,
Canada), C.-J. Liao (Taiwan, Taiwan), T. Loukil
(Sfax, Tunisia), T. Murata (Osaka, Japan), E.
Neron (Tours, France), E. Nowicki (Wroclaw,
Poland), G. Parks (Cambridge, UK), C. Potts

6
W.E. Smith (1956): Various optimizers for single-stage
production, Naval Research Logistics Quarterly 3(1), 5966.
Even though Smith did not explicit state he solved a bicriteria
problem, he proposed an algorithm which in fact solves the
single machine problem with the total completion time criterion
and the maximum lateness criterion.
7
See V. Tkindt and J.-C. Billaut (2002): Multicriteria
Scheduling: Theory, Models and Algorithms, Springer.

Editorial / European Journal of Operational Research 167 (2005) 589591

(Southampton, UK), C. Rajendran (Madras,

India), I. Sahin (Istanbul, Turkey), S. Sayin (Istanbul, Turkey), A. Schulz (Cambridge, USA), N.
Shakhlevich (Leeds, UK), P. Siarry (Creteil,
France), F. Sourd (Paris, France), A. Tsoukias
(Paris, France), F. Werner (Magdeburg, Germany), J.-M. Wilson (Loughborough, UK), T.
Yamada (Kyoto, Japan) and W.-C. Yeh (Taichung, Taiwan).
To introduce multicriteria scheduling it was
necessary to include in this feature issue a comprehensive and updated presentation of the eld.
There was no doubt that Han Hoogeveen was

591

the best candidate to write such a survey, and it

was our pleasure when he accepted to do so. In
his invited paper you will nd a clear presentation
of the basics of multicriteria scheduling illustrated
by two representative problems. He also included a
state-of-the-art survey of the main results as well
as new trends. It is denitely a good introduction
for this feature issue.
Vincent Tkindt
Jean-Charles Billaut
Available online 15 September 2004