The Computer Science Department invites the College community to the first in a series of colloquia on computer science research on Wednesday Oct. 26 in Building 1N, Room 111 from 2:30pm to 3:30pm. We are honored to have Professor Yumei Huo give the first in a series of ongoing research talks. Professor Huo’s topic and abstract will be “Minimizing Total Completion Time in Two-Machine Flow Shops with Exact Delays.”

The abstract notes that “We studied the problem of minimizing total completion time in the two-machine flow shop with an exact delay model. This problem is a generalization of the no-wait flow shop problem, which is known to be strongly NP-hard. Our problem has many applications but little results are given in the literature, so far. We focus on permutation schedules. We first prove that some simple algorithms can be used to find the optimal schedules for some special cases. Then for the general case, we design some heuristics as well as metaheuristics whose performance is shown to be effective by computational experiments. Due to the large number of instances required to be executed, our experiments were performed on HPC computers.”