The impact of lot splitting in a single machine scheduling problem with earliness - Tardiness penalties

This paper consider a scheduling problem in which each job in the system can be split into several sublots and need to be processed on a single machine. During processing, a setup time is incurred whenever there is a switch from processing a job in one sublot to a job in another sublot. All sublots belong to the same job have a common due date. The objective in this research is to minimize the total earliness and tardiness penalties. The approach was performed using both a mathematical programming model for small size problems and a heuristic algorithm for medium to large problems. The study shows the benefits from job splitting improve monotonically with decreasing sublot size and that job splitting can provide improvements as long as the setup to processing time ratios less than 25%.