《2016 An efficient priority rule for scheduling job shops to minimize mean tardiness》.pdf

IIE Transactions (2006) 38, 789–795 Copyright C “IIE” ISSN: 0740-817X print / 1545-8830 online DOI: 10.1080/07408170600710523 An efficient priority rule for scheduling job shops to minimize mean tardiness MICHAEL X. WENG∗ and HAIYING REN Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA E-mail: weng@eng.usf.edu Received June 1999 and accepted October 2005 The ability to respond quickly to customer demands is a key factor in successfully competing in today’s globally competitive markets. Thus, meeting due dates could be the most important goal of scheduling in many manufacturing and service industries. Meeting due dates can naturally be translated into minimizing job tardiness. In this paper we present a priority rule for dynamic job shop scheduling that minimizes mean job tardiness. The rule is developed based on the characteristics of existing dispatching rules. With job due dates set by the generalized total work content rule, the computational results of simulation experiments show that the proposed dispatching rule consistently, and often, significantly outperforms a number of well-known priority rules in the literature. The proposed rule is also robust being the best or near-best rule for reducing the mean flowtime, for all the shop load levels and due date tightness factors tested. 1. Introduction For the reasons given above, we use the minimization of the Mean Tardiness (MT) as the scheduling objective. The Increasing global competition is forcing manufacturing and minimization of MT has been used as the primary objec- service companies to focus on producing high quality goods tive in scheduling job shops in order to meet job due dates at a low cost and being able to quickly respond to fluctu- (Conway e