Minmax due-date assignment with a time window for acceptable lead-times

In a standard DIF due-date assignment model, customers may consider late due-dates as unacceptable, i.e., if a due-date is assigned later than a pre-specified lead time, the supplier is penalized. This note extends this setting by adding a lower bound on the acceptable lead-time, reflecting e.g., the time needed by the customer for preparation of storage space. Thus, in addition to the standard earliness/tardiness penalties of jobs, our model contains penalties for early and tardy due-dates. The objective is of a minmax type, i.e. we try to minimize the highest (job and due-date) cost. An efficient O(n) solution algorithm (where n is the number of jobs) is introduced.