Late and early work scheduling: A survey

Abstract The paper presents the survey of scheduling problems with the criteria based on early and late work. Early and late work corresponds to the size of a job executed before and after its expected due date, respectively. Since the first survey on late work related criteria from 2011, a lot of new interesting results have been obtained, which are collected in the presented work. They include the complexity analysis and proposals of exact, heuristic and approximation algorithms for various models with single machine, parallel and dedicated machines, extended with additional parameters and constraints such as learning effect, machine non-availability, machine eligibility, and setup times. The studies on early and late work in the context of online scheduling, multi-agent scheduling, Pareto-frontier analysis and mirror scheduling are also reported, as well as their applications in supply chain management, flexible manufacturing, distributed computing and carbon footprint minimization. The relation to the associated models of imprecise computation scheduling and scheduling with controllable processing times is discussed.