Tambalacoque. For a formal account of the gist of a scholarly argument

Argumentation as reflected in a short communication from the published literature of botany and zoology is discussed. Trying to capture the logic structure of the argument, however imperfectly, is relevant to information science and depends on a particular goal: namely, to potentially benefit the task of sketching the relationship between bibliographic entries in a better manner than is possible with present-day bibliometric or scientometric practice. This imposes tight limits on the depth of analysis of the text.

Scheduling for parallel dedicated machines with a single server

This paper examines scheduling problems in which the setup phase of each operation needs to be attended by a single server, common for all jobs and different from the processing machines. The objective in each situation is to minimize the makespan. For the processing system consisting of two parallel dedicated machines we prove that the problem of finding an optimal schedule is NP-hard in the strong sense even if all setup times are equal or if all processing times are equal. For the case of m parallel dedicated machines, a simple greedy algorithm is shown to create a schedule with the makespan that is at most twice the optimum value. For the two machine case, an improved heuristic guarantees a tight worst-case ratio of 3/2. We also describe several polynomially solvable cases of the later problem. The two-machine flow shop and the open shop problems with a single server are also shown to be NP-hard in the strong sense. However, we reduce the two-machine flow shop no-wait problem with a single server to the Gilmore-Gomory traveling salesman problem and solve it in polynomial time. (c) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An open shop scheduling problem with a non-bottleneck machine

This paper considers the problem of processing n jobs in a two-machine non-preemptive open shop to minimize the makespan, i.e., the maximum completion time. One of the machines is assumed to be non-bottleneck. It is shown that, unlike its flow shop counterpart, the problem is NP-hard in the ordinary sense. On the other hand, the problem is shown to be solvable by a dynamic programming algorithm that requires pseudopolynomial time. The latter algorithm can be converted into a fully polynomial approximation scheme that runs in time. An O(n log n) approximation algorithm is also designed whi finds a schedule with makespan at most 5/4 times the optimal value, and this bound is tight.