The modified due date scheduling is a scheduling heuristic created in 1982 by Baker and Bertrand,[1] used to solve the NP-hard single machine total-weighted tardiness problem.
This problem is centered around reducing the global tardiness of a list of tasks which are characterized by their processing time, due date and weight by re-ordering them.
MDD is similar to the earliest due date (EDD) heuristic except that MDD takes into account the partial sequence of job that have been already constructed, whereas EDD only looks at the jobs' due dates.
This example can be generalized to schedule any list of job characterized by a due date and a processing time.
Applying this heuristic will result in a sorted list of tasks which tardiness cannot be reduced by adjacent pair-wise interchange.