Scheduling and Order Acceptance for the Customized Stochastic Lot Scheduling Problem

This paper develops and analyzes several customer order acceptance policies to achieve high bottleneck utilization for the customized stochastic lot scheduling problem (CSLSP) with large setups and strict order due dates. To compare the policies simulation is used as main tool, due to the complicated nature of the problem. Also approximate upper and lower bound for the utilization are provided. It is shown that a greedy approach to accept orders performs poorly in that it achieves low utilization for high customer order arrival rates. Rather, good acceptance and scheduling policies for the CSLSP should sometimes reject orders to create slack even when there is room in the schedule to start new production runs. We show that intelligently introducing slack enables to achieve high utilization. One particularly simple policy is to restrict the number of families present.