Shop floor dispatching with variable urgent operations based on Workload Control: An assessment by simulation

Meeting customer time requirements poses a major challenge in the context of high-variety make-to-order companies. Companies need to reduce the lead time and process urgent jobs in time, while realising high delivery reliability. The key decision stages within Workload Control (WLC) are order release and shop floor dispatching. To the best of our knowledge, recent research has mainly focused on order release stage and inadvertently ignored shop floor dispatching stage. Meanwhile, urgency of job is not only related to its due date, but also affected by the dynamics of shop floor. Specifically, urgency of jobs may decrease at downstream operations in the job's routing, since priority dispatching for urgent jobs accelerates production speed at the upstream operations. And occupying production resources increases the waiting time of non-urgent jobs at workstation. This phenomenon leads to the change of urgency of jobs. Misjudgement of urgent jobs therefore may result in actual urgent jobs not being processed in time. In response, the authors focus on shop floor dispatching stage and consider the transient status of urgent operations in the context of WLC. The urgency of jobs is rejudged at the input buffer of each workstation, which is firstly defined as urgent operations and non-urgent operations. Using simulation, the results show that considering the transient status of urgent operations contributes to speeding up production for actual urgent jobs and meeting delivery performance both in General Flow Shop and Pure Job Shop. In addition, percentage tardy performance is greatly affected by norm levels, especially at the severe urgent level. These have important implications on how urgent operations should be designed and how norm level should be set at shop floor dispatching stage. Misjudgement of urgent jobs may result in actual urgent jobs not being processed in time. This study focuses on shop floor dispatching stage and considers the transient status of urgent operations in the context of WLC. The urgency of jobs is rejudged at the input buffer of each workstation, which is firstly defined as urgent operations and non-urgent operations.image

Automated summary

This study focuses on the transient status of urgent operations in the context of workload control (WLC) at the shop floor dispatching stage. It reevaluates the urgency of jobs at the input buffer of each workstation and shows that considering the transient status of urgent operations contributes to speeding up production and improving delivery performance.