Labor-Limited Environments

Thus far, we have assumed that a job never has to wait for lack of a worker. The limiting resource has been the number of machines or workstations available. More typical, however, is a labor-limited environment in which the resource constraint is the amount of labor available, not the number of machines or workstations. In this case, workers are trained to work on a variety of machines or tasks to increase the flexibility of operations.

In a labor-limited environment, the scheduler not only must decide which job to process next at a particular workstation but also must ...

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