Due date quoting and rescheduling in a fixed production sequence.

In this article, the due date setting problem consisting of due date quoting, order insertion and rescheduling with relevant sequence-dependent setups and a frozen zone is considered. A differential equation model is introduced. The differential equation can be solved analytically and requires low computing effort. Explicit expressions are gained concerning the earliest possible due date (due date quoting problem) and the latest possible insertion position (rescheduling problem) in order to meet the customer requested due date. The differential equation model is compared with an approach based on a recently introduced hybrid binomial inverse hypergeometric probability distribution for the due date quoting problem. The analytical results of the proposed model are very close to the expectation values (these cannot be explicitly calculated, and high computation effort is required) of the recently introduced approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]