The just-in-time concept in manufacturing has aroused interest in machine scheduling problems with earliness-tardiness penalties. In particular, common due date problems, which are structurally less complicated than problems with general due dates, have emerged as an interesting and proliic eld of research. We prove that so-called almost common due date problems, in which the due date d j and p...

.................................................................................................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................ iv LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................ ix LIST OF FIGURES ...............................

The problem of scheduling n jobs with a large common due date on a single machine is addressed. The objective is to minimize the jobs’ total earliness and tardiness. In this paper, sequence-dependent setup times are considered, which makes the problem NP-Hard. Therefore, exact algorithms are very unlikely to optimally solve large problems within reasonable computational time. A Simulated Anneal...