Optimal release times in single-stage manufacturing systems

We consider an optimal control problem in single-stage manufacturing systems that are modeled as a deterministic queue. The objective is to determine the release times of parts while minimizing a measure of the discrepancy between the jobs´ completion times and the given due dates. Although this optimal control problem is neither convex nor differentiable, we cast it in the form of a convex differentiable nonlinear programming problem. By exploiting a special structural property, we develop an efficient algorithm for computing optimal controls, and it turns out that the algorithm has linear complexity with respect to the dimension of the original optimal control problem.