05281 Abstracts Collection - Simulation & Scheduling: Companions or Competitors for Improving the Performance of Manufacturing Systems

Scheduling is a critical need for manufacturing and service systems, and it is not exaggeration to say that e ective and timely scheduling can be the di erence between success and failure in an era when customers demand rapid response, product customization and low prices. As a result, there has been an explosion of Deterministic Scheduling papers over the decade with a strong group of researchers from Computer Science, Operational Research, and Industrial Engineering departments. Discrete Event Simulation (DES) has become a widely used technique to predict and ultimately improve the performance of manufacturing and service systems. In particular, DES is often used in capacity planning, to evaluate order release policies, and to evaluate dispatching policies. However, deterministic scheduling approaches are not often evaluated in this way. There is a well established research community focused on DES issues in Manufacturing and Services, mainly from Computer Science and Industrial Engineering departments. Further, advances in simulation design and analysis methodology is making optimization of DES models feasible. While both of these research communities are working to improve manufacturing and service system performance, the two groups rarely work together. Our goal was to bring these two communities together to see if synergistic results from interactions between them can be identi ed. In particular we set out to investigate issues common to both communities such as: