Scheduling of inventory releasing jobs to minimize a regular objective function of delivery times

In this note we provide new complexity and algorithmic results for scheduling inventory releasing jobs, a new class of single machine scheduling problems proposed recently by Boysen et al. We focus on tardiness related criteria, while known results are concerned with inventory levels between fixed delivery points. Our interest is motivated by the fact that deciding whether a feasible schedule exists is NP-hard in the strong sense, provided that all delivery deadlines are fixed, and there are no restrictions on the amount of products released by the jobs, nor on the job processing times. We will establish NP-hardness results, or provide polynomial or pseudo-polynomial time algorithms for various special cases, and describe a fully polynomial approximation scheme for one of the variants with the maximum tardiness criterion. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York