Group sequencing around a common due date

The problem of scheduling groups of jobs on a single machine under the group technology assumption is studied. Jobs of the same group are processed contiguously and a sequence independent setup time precedes the processing of each group. All jobs have a common fixed due date, which can be either unrestrictively large or restrictively small. The objective is to minimize the total weighted earliness-tardiness. Properties of optimal solutions are established, and dynamic programming algorithms are derived to solve several special cases of this problem. Computational experiments show that the algorithms can easily solve problems with 500 groups of jobs and each group has 10 to 50 jobs on a standard PC.