Dissatisfaction levels of earliness and tardiness durations by relaxing common due date on single machine scheduling problems

This paper investigates single machine earliness/tardiness problem considering the decision maker’s tolerances for earliness and tardiness durations in case of a restrictive common due date. In many classical or basic earliness/tardiness problems, due dates are accepted as deterministic or rigid numbers. In this paper, common due date in a single machine scheduling problem is relaxed with lower and upper bounds and these bounds are used for illustrating the decision maker’s tolerances or satisfaction levels by using fuzzy sets. As a complementary set of satisfaction levels, dissatisfaction levels can be encoded with fuzzy sets. Then, this paper uses dissatisfaction levels in order to introduce a new objective criterion that minimizes the products of earliness and tardiness durations with dissatisfaction levels.