Job shop scheduling with earliness, tardiness and intermediate inventory holding costs

Motivated by the problem of scheduling customer orders in a make-to-order supply chain with relatively expensive intermediates, we consider a job shop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the sum of tardiness, earliness (finished goods inventory holding) and intermediate (work-in-process) inventory holding costs. Our goal is to develop scheduling heuristics to minimize the total cost and demonstrate the effectiveness of these heuristics computationally.