A simulation study for evaluating the performance measures and dispatching rules of production scdeduling

This study treats the selection and application of performance measures and rules for production scheduling (PS). Twenty performance measures and fourteen rules are considered. The experimental factors include shop patterns, scheduling rules, number of machines, job orders arrival, number of jobs, number of operations, processing time, due date, earliness cost, and tardiness cost. The simulation results indicated that, for multi-criteria performance measures, the best three conflicting measures are minimizing the modified mean flow time, minimizing the cost ratio of tardiness and earliness, and minimizing the slack capacity of the machines. Also, the obtained results showed that, the shortest processing time rule is preferred when the performance measures are related to flow time, work in process, or shop utilization. For the due date related performance measures, modified due-date rule is better than the other rules. Finally, the modified slack rule is the best rule for the cost related performance measures.