Job Shop Scheduling with Fixed Delivery Dates

Abstract—In most classical scheduling models, a job is assumed to deliver to a customer at the instant of a job processing completion. In numerous practical situations, however, multiple delivery dates exist, where the time interval between any two consecutive delivery dates is constant. This type of fixed delivery strategy results in substantial cost savings for transportation and handling. This study focuses on job scheduling in a dynamic job shop environment to minimize the sum of the total due-date cost and the total earliness penalty. This study identified two existing dispatching rules, and proposed six new rules by explicitly considering different due date costs per time unit and/or earliness penalty per time unit of a job. The simulation results show that the proposed dispatching rules are significantly superior to their original counterparts.