Scheduling with a general learning effect

Jobs with different processing complexity may have different effects on human learning, which in turn will affect the job processing times. So, the learning effect on job processing times in scheduling is not only sum-of-processing-time-based and job-position-based, but also depends on the processing complexity of the jobs already processed. We introduce in this paper a general learning effect model for scheduling. We provide some properties that are helpful for finding the optimal solutions for some single-machine and flowshop scheduling problems under the general effect model.