Note on scheduling with general learning curves to minimize the number of tardy jobs

Several research studies have confirmed that people and organizations become better at their tasks as the tasks are repeated. The effect of this learning phenomenon on classical scheduling problems has been studied recently. One of the single-machine scheduling problems which seems to become nontrivial when learning effects are introduced is that of minimizing the number of tardy jobs. In this note, we study the special case where all jobs share a common due-date. We show that even when the learning process is assumed to be general and job-dependent, the problem remains polynomially solvable.