New article in the "Journal of Scheduling"

We are pleased to announce a new publication of the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Industrial Engineering in the Journal of Scheduling entitled "Minimizing the earliness–tardiness for the customer order scheduling problem in a dedicated machine environment".

Abstract:

How are products scheduled on machines when a multitude of customers place orders that each comprise several products and require joint delivery? This article addresses this so-called Customer Order Scheduling Problem (COSP) and shows how orders are to be scheduled to deliver the products of an order as precisely as possible at the agreed time. On the one hand, the aim is to minimize order delays to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction and, at the same time, avoid possible penalty costs. On the other hand, the aim is to avoid premature completion of the products in order to keep warehousing costs low.

Essentially, the use of this very comprehensible earliness-tardiness objective function leads to an extremely demanding scheduling of orders. This paper is the first to address the challenge of using this objective function for the COSP. For this purpose, the problem is first formulated as a mixed-integer problem, and some problem properties are derived. To solve large problem instances, the authors develop six variants of an iterated greedy algorithm and demonstrate their performance for efficiently solving the problem.

Hoffmann, J., Neufeld, J.S., Buscher, U.: Minimizing the earliness–tardiness for the customer order scheduling problem in a dedicated machine environment. Journal of Scheduling (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-024-00814-z