A unified solution approach for the due date assignment problem with tardy jobs

We analyze a number of due date assignment problems with the weighted number of tardy jobs objective and show that these problems can be solved in O(n(2)) time by dynamic programming. We show that the effects of learning or the effects of past-sequence-dependent setup times can be incorporated into the problem formulation at no additional computational cost. We also show that some single-machine due date assignment problems can be extended to an identical parallel machine setting. Finally, we improve the complexity of the solution algorithms for two other due date assignment problems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.