Earliness/Tardiness Production Scheduling and Planning, and solutions

Earliness/Tardiness Production Planning (ETPSP) has attracted much attention in recent years. In practice, it provides an efficient way to integrate Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP-II) Scheduling and with Just-In Time (JIT). Conventional research mainly focused on the condition of single-machine and parallel multi-machine. Capacity balance has not been considered. Some investigations of existing research on ETPSP are given in this paper. An extensive model of ETPSP with consideration of multi-process capacity balance for manufacturing systems is proposed. Two alternative solutions, key-process method and relaxation method, are both developed to solve ETPSP. Computational results identify that both methods are powerful to solve ETPSP which minimizes total earliness and tardiness penalties. Furthermore, some comparisons between these two methods and other conventional methods indicate the efficiency of the former.