An efficient meta-heuristic for the single machine common due date scheduling problem

A new meta-heuristic for scheduling multiple jobs on a single machine so that they are completed by a common specified date (neither earlier, nor later) is addressed in this paper. Costs are set depending on whether a job finished before (earliness), or after (tardiness) the specified due date. The objective is to minimize the total weighted earliness and tardiness penalized costs from the specified common due date. Minimizing these costs pushes the completion time of each job as close as possible to the due date. Extensive computational experiments over public benchmark problems show the effectiveness of the developed approach. In particular, the proposed meta-heuristic put new improved upper bounds on the majority of the benchmarks test problems.