Periodic due date assignment with family setups

Abstract

In this study we consider a single machine due date assignment problem involving dynamic job arrivals and family setups. The due date quotation process is based on periodically generating schedules of new and old jobs. We want to keep the tardiness of old jobs below an allowable threshold while minimizing total completion time of new arriving jobs. We propose a mixed integer linear programming formulation to solve the scheduling problem. We also present a function to quote due dates for new jobs. An experimental analysis is conducted to analyze the proposed due date quotation process under various shop and solution procedure parameters. Three performance measures are considered: average quoted lead time, average tardiness, number of setups performed. The first significant outcome of our analysis is that existence of family setups plays a crucial role; the second significant observation is that batching plays a double-edged sword role in due date management. © INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING.