A production scheduling strategy with a common due window

This paper studies a production scheduling problem in a multinational company in Hong Kong, the headquarters, sales branches and factories of which are located in different countries and regions. Some orders are required to go for processing in a particular factory. Based on a Just-In-Time (JIT) strategy, an objective function is defined for the production scheduling problem with a due window. A series of Lemmas and a polynomial-time algorithm are presented to determine the optimal due window and sequence. The algorithm is tested on data collected from the company. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.