Minimizing Total Weighted Tardiness with Drop Dead Dates in Single Machine Scheduling Problem

This paper deals with minimization of tardiness in single machine scheduling problem when each job has two different due-dates i.e. ordinary due-date and drop dead date. The drop dead date is the date in which jobs’ weights rise sharply or the customer cancels the order. A linear programming formulation is developed for the problem and since the problem is known to be NP-hard, three heuristic algorithms are designed for the problem based on Tabu search mechanism. Extensive numerical experiments were conducted to observe and compare the behavior of the algorithms in solving the problem.