Joint replenishment meets scheduling

Abstract: In this paper we consider a combination of the joint replenishment problem (JRP) and single machine scheduling with release dates. There is a single machine and one or more item types. Each job has a release date, a positive processing time, and it requires a subset of items. A job can be started at time $t$ only if all the required item types were replenished between the release date of the job and time point $t$. The ordering of item types for distinct jobs can be combined. The objective is to minimize the total ordering cost plus a scheduling criterion, such as total weighted completion time or maximum flow time, where the cost of ordering a subset of items simultaneously is the sum of a joint ordering cost, and an additional item ordering cost for each item type in the subset. We provide several complexity results for the offline problem, and competitive analysis for online variants with min-sum and min-max criteria, respectively.