Order acceptance and due-date quotation in low machine rates

In real manufacturing environments, some customer orders include multiple jobs. However, a single due-date should be assigned to each order. Further, machine processing rate is not constant at all times. In effect, in many manufacturing operations, the machine processing rate decreases to a subnormal level during time and needs a special type of maintenance to bring the normal state back. Due to this reduction in capacity, production schedulers may decide to reject some orders. In this paper, the novel extensive problem of selecting a subset of orders, assigning due-dates to selected orders, scheduling the selected orders and jobs within each one, and scheduling the rate-modifying maintenance is studied. The objective function is minimizing total cost of lost-sales of rejected orders together with due-date length and maximum of earliness and tardiness of selected orders. The problem is proved polynomial and an optimal approach is developed.