A New Dominance Concept in Scheduling n Jobs on a Single Machine with Ready Times and Due Dates

Scheduling a set of jobs on a single machine is studied where each job has a specified ready time and due date (limit times). A dominance relationship is established within the set of possible sequences and results in an important restriction of the number of sequences to be considered in solving the feasibility problem. Establishing the dominance relationship leading to this restriction requires only the ordering of ready times and due dates and is thus independent of job processing times and of any change in limit times which does not affect the given order.