Scheduling Rules for a Small Dynamic Job-shop: a Simulation Approach

The objective of this paper is to study a selected set of scheduling criteria commonly used in scheduling research and develop a set of simple rules that can be easily implemented in relatively small dynamic job-shops. Simulation models were developed for two dynamic production shop environments, namely, a job-shop with jumbled flow and a job-shop with limited jumbled flow. Five scheduling criteria were used with each of the three models. They are, (i) Slack per Remaining Operations (SPRO), (ii) Priority Ratio (PR), (iii) Earliest Due Date (EDD), (iv) Total Work Content Remaining (TWKR), and (v) Smallest Processing Time (SPT). In each of these cases, performance statistics relating to work-in-process (WIP) inventory and job lateness were gathered. The results show that in most cases, simple rules such as SPT and EDD outperform the other rules. SPT rule minimizes the performance metrics that measure WIP inventory levels and the EDD rule minimizes the performance metrics that measure deviation of job completion time from the promised due date. (Received in February 2010, accepted in July 2010. This paper was with the authors 2 months for 1 revision.)