MGMT20005 Business Decision Analysis Assignment Forty per cent of total assessment Due time and date: 5 pm Monday 13 May 2013 using the LMS assignment submission procedure Word limit: 4000 words Our question is motivated by a study of a Queensland coal supply chain. That work considered issues of mine, rail and stockyard management as well as ship loading. We shall restrict our attention to the ship loading issue, and shall fur- ther simplify and abstract the problem to, hopefully, make it, simultaneously, manageable by and of su±cient interest to the long su®ering student. The movement of ships in and out of ports is restricted by the tides. This leads to certain limits being imposed on the timing of the loading process. A similar problem is that of scheduling activities requiring some resource, such as a supervisor at the start of the process, where furthermore the supervisor is only available during certain time periods. We assume we have a single machine and a set of jobs to be processed by the machine. The machine can process at most one job at a time. The jobs are of di®erent durations, all in the range (0,1] (after suitable scaling). A job, once started must be completed without interruption. All jobs are available at time t = 0. The time (half-)line ft : t ¸ 0g is composed of intervals of length 2: [0,2), [2,4), [4,6), . . . . We recall that [4,6), for example, is the set ft : 4 · t