Earliness/tardiness production planning approaches with due-window for manufacturing systems

Although the earliness/tardiness production planning approaches for manufacturing systems with due-date have appeared in the literature, in practice, customers prefer a time duration rather than an exact due-date. This kind of due-date is called due-window. This paper focuses on the production planning problems to minimize the total earliness and tardiness penalties with a due-window subject to the manufacturing resource constraints. Two models, one for mass manufacture and another for one-of-a-kind product (OKP) manufacture, are discussed separately. By means of mathematical deduction, the model for mass manufacture is translated into a linear programming problem and solved by a simplex method. In the case of OKP manufacture, the problem is reduced to a linear 0–1 programming model, using the elaborate definition of variables. The computational results show that both algorithms achieve the optimal production planning and are applicable to practical manufacturing systems.