Effect of Activity Schedulings and Inventory Control: an Experimental Investigation for Pc Assembly

This paper investigates three scheduling algorithms and three inventory control policies to evaluate their effect on the system performance measures using computer simulation. The model chosen is a flow-shop type, computer assembly plant. Analysis is conducted on two scheduling measures (summation of process time and tardiness) and two inventory control measures (ordering cost and holding cost). The scheduling algorithms used are Shortest Processing Time, Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing. The aim of the applied algorithms was to minimize the sum of flow times. Since it is known that SPT minimizes sum of flow times, it provides a benchmark for comparing the efficiency of genetic algorithm and simulated annealing search methods. EOQ, MRP and JIT are used as inventory control methods. An experimental design for the comparison is presented to evaluate which combination of control methods produces the best results under the designed scenario.