A bi-criterion approach to minimizing inventory costs on a single machine when early shipments are forbidden (Q579120)

The concept of job earliness as a measure of inventory costs for single machine scheduling is introduced. The justification of earliness as a cost is presented. It is pointed out that the Japanese have long recognized earliness as a cost. The additon of earliness greatly complicated finding an optimum solution, since reducing earliness may require the insertion of machine idle time. Another measure commonly used to represent inventory cost is flowtime. In this paper, a combination of earliness and flowtime is used to represent total inventory costs. Some preliminary results are presented illustrating the complexity of solving this problem.