Common Due-Date Problem: Exact Polynomial Algorithms for a Given Job Sequence

This paper considers the problem of scheduling jobs on single and parallel machines where all the jobs possess different processing times but a common due date. There is a penalty involved with each job if it is processed earlier or later than the due date. The objective of the problem is to find the assignment of jobs to machines, the processing sequence of jobs and the time at which they are processed, which minimizes the total penalty incurred due to tardiness or earliness of the jobs. This work presents exact polynomial algorithms for optimizing a given job sequence for single and parallel machines with the run-time complexities of O(n log n) and O(mn² log n) respectively, where n is the number of jobs and m the number of machines. The algorithms take a sequence consisting of all the jobs (J_i, i = 1,2,...,n) as input and distribute the jobs to machines (for m>1) along with their best completion times so as to get the least possible total penalty for this sequence. We prove the optimality for the single machine case and the runtime complexities of both. Henceforth, we present the results for the benchmark problems and compare with previous work for both single and parallel machine cases, up to 200 jobs.