Title: Sequence and due date assignment with uncertain processing times and mixed penalty functions

Authors: Yu Xia, Jinfeng Yue, Gesha Hu

Addresses: Department of Management and Marketing, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN 37132, USA. ' Department of Management and Marketing, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN 37132, USA. ' Department of Economy and Management, WuXi Radio and Television University, Wuxi 214000, China

Abstract: This research considers a single machine production system with stochastic processing times. Since complete distribution information of the processing time of each job is difficult or impossible to achieve, we introduce a heuristic procedure using only mean and variance information. An objective function combining three penalties: quadratic penalty on job earliness, quadratic penalty on job tardiness and linear penalty associated with long due date assignment is studied. Numerical tests indicate that our procedure performs better than the method only considering mean information. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed procedure is robust to job processing time distributions.

Keywords: due date assignment; heuristics; production system; sequencing; uncertain processing time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBSR.2008.020578

International Journal of Business and Systems Research, 2008 Vol.2 No.3, pp.258 - 271

Published online: 30 Sep 2008 *

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