New Dispatching Rules for Scheduling in a Job Shop - an Experimental Study

We present two new dispatching rules for scheduling in a job shop. These rules combine the process-time and work-content in the queue for the next operation on a job, by making use of additive and alternative approaches. An extensive and rigorous simulation study has been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed dispatching rules against those by the SPT rule, the WINQ rule, a random rule based on the SPT and WINQ rules, and the best existing rule. The important aspects of the results of the experimental investigation are also discussed in detail.