An investigation of order release and flow time allowance policies for assembly job shops

The effects of a number of essentially different work order release and flow time allowance policies on the assembly order flow times and assembly order due date performance are investigated. Work orders within an assembly order have different routing length. The assembly order flow time is the time that elapses between the release of the first work order and the completion of the last work order of the assembly order. The timing of the release of work orders, and the distribution of the flow time allowance over the work orders in an assembly order were varied, and used systematic computer simulation to investigate the effects on performance. The results show that the best performance is obtained with simultaneous work order release, an average operation flow time allowance equal to the average operation waiting time and equalized flow time allowances per work order in an assembly order.