Minmax due‐date assignment with a time window for acceptable lead‐times

In a standard DIF due‐date assignment model, customers may consider late due‐dates as unacceptable, i.e., if a due‐date is assigned later than a pre‐specified lead time, the supplier is penalized. This note extends this setting by adding a lower bound on the acceptable lead‐time, reflecting e.g., the time needed by the customer for preparation of storage space. Thus, in addition to the standard earliness/tardiness penalties of jobs, our model contains penalties for early and tardy due‐dates. The objective is of a minmax type, i.e. we try to minimize the highest (job and due‐date) cost. An efficient O(n) solution algorithm (where n is the number of jobs) is introduced.