EXAMPLE 4 Photocopy Shop and Data Entry Problems

Imagine a photocopy shop with three photocopiers. Photocopying tasks that must be completed overnight are accepted until 5 P.M. The tasks are to be done in any manner that minimizes the finish time for all the work. Because this problem involves scheduling machines for independent tasks, the decreasing-time-list algorithm would be a good heuristic to apply.

For another example, consider a data entry pool at a large corporation or college, where individual entry tasks can be assigned to any data entry specialist. In this setting, however, the assumption that the data entry workers are identical in skill is less likely to be true. Hence, the tasks might have different times with different processors. This phenomenon, which occurs in real-world scheduling problems, violates one of the assumptions of our mathematical model.