Production scheduling in a make-to-order job shop under job arrival uncertainty

Abstract

We consider job release control to improve the due date performance in a make-to-order job shop with fluctuating job arrival and fixed due dates. The basic idea is to delay the release of non-urgent jobs and control the work in process (WIP) before the bottleneck so as to control the lead time of urgent jobs. We propose two job release control models: bounded constraint control model and linear control model. In the two models, we analyze the effects of workload limit on the reduction of variability, the total WIP in the system as well as the WIP in the shop floor. We then build a spreadsheet simulation of queueing model to show the improvement of due date performance by job release control in a job shop.