<P>SUPPLY CHAIN SCHEDULING- aeesmbly systems<BR><BR>Abstract<BR>We study conflict and cooperation issues in supply chain manufacturing. Consider an assembly<BR>system where suppliers provide parts to a manufacturer. A product cannot be delivered until all its<BR>parts have been supplied. The manufacturer performs nonbottleneck operations, for example outsourced<BR>assembly, packaging and delivery, for each product. Two classical scheduling objectives are considered:<BR>minimization of the total completion time and of the maximum lateness. We analyze how far from<BR>optimal the best schedule for a suppliers’ scheduling problem can be for the corresponding manufacturer’s<BR>problem, and vice versa. To resolve these conflicts, we consider four alternative assumptions<BR>about the relative bargaining power of the suppliers and the manufacturer, and in each case describe<BR>a practical mechanism for cooperation between the decision makers. Specifying the optimal strategies<BR>implied by these mechanisms requires the solution of various scheduling problems by the suppliers, the<BR>manufacturer and the overall system. For all these scheduling problems, we provide either an efficient<BR>algorithm or a proof of intractability. Moreover, for two problems that we show are intractable, we describe<BR>heuristics and analyze their worst case performance or demonstrate asymptotic optimality of their<BR>solutions. We demonstrate computationally that the cost saving realized by cooperation between the<BR>decision makers is significant in many cases. Extensions of our models to consider bottleneck operations<BR>at the manufacturer and transportation times are also developed.<BR>Key Words and Phrases: supply chain scheduling, cooperation in decision making, polynomial time<BR>algorithm, heuristic.<BR></P>