Scheduling with regular performance measures and optional job rejection on a single machine

Abstract: We address single machine problems with optional jobs - rejection, studied recently in Zhang et al. [21] and Cao et al. [2]. In these papers, the authors focus on minimizing regular performance measures, i.e., functions that are non-decreasing in the jobs completion time, subject to the constraint that the total rejection cost cannot exceed a predefined upper bound. They also prove that the considered problems are ordinary NP-hard and provide pseudo-polynomial-time Dynamic Programming (DP) solutions. In this paper, we focus on three of these problems: makespan with release-dates; total completion times; and total weighted completion, and present enhanced DP solutions demonstrating both theoretical and practical improvements. Moreover, we provide extensive numerical studies verifying their efficiency.