Common due date assignment with generalized earliness/tardiness penalties

•We consider the common due date assignment problem.•We consider generalized earliness/tardiness penalties.•We solve the problem in polynomial time by dynamic programming.•We also consider special cases and extensions of the problem.

We consider the single-machine common due date assignment problem with generalized earliness/tardiness penalties and show that the problem can be solved optimally in polynomial time by dynamic programming. We also present a faster linear time algorithm for a special case of the problem. A number of extensions with compressible job processing times, two assigned due dates and additional terms in the objective function are also analyzed and solved optimally in polynomial time.