Scheduling for non regular performance measure under the due window approach

In the last two decades, Just-In-Time (JIT) production has proved to be an essential requirement of world class manufacturing. This has made schedulers most concerned about the realization of a JIT environment. The JIT concept requires not only a penalty for backorder and lateness but also for earliness. This can be translated into non-regular scheduling objectives. The most obvious objective can be to minimize the deviation of completion times. Concerning earliness/tardiness problems, researchers have usually considered systems where jobs incur no penalty for completion at a certain point of time (i.e. due date). In practice, however, job completions can also be accepted without penalty within an interval in time, which is known as the due window. This paper studies the scheduling problems in terms of the non-regular measure, mean absolute deviation (MAD), under the due window approach. The study is conducted in a dynamic job shop environment. Furthermore, we propose two new rules that perform quite effectively for the MAD measure. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd.