An Integrated Shop Floor Dispatching Rule by Considering Urgent State of Jobs 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 realizing 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 that different dispatching rules for different urgency state of the job should be adopted at shop floor dispatching stage. At the shop floor dispatching stage, adopting different rule for urgent jobs and non-urgent jobs can reduce the percentage tardy and tardiness time. In response, this study focuses on shop floor dispatching stage and considers urgent state of job dispatching rule based on WLC. That is, an integrated shop floor dispatching rule (time-oriented dispatching rule for urgent jobs and load-oriented dispatching rule for non-urgent jobs) is adopted. That is, an integrated shop floor dispatching rule (time-oriented dispatching rule for urgent jobs and load-oriented dispatching rule for non-urgent jobs) is adopted. Using simulation, the results show that adopting a time-oriented shop floor dispatching rule for urgent jobs according to current time and due date or planned start time of operations improves the delivery performance, especially percentage tardy. These have important implications on how dispatching rules for urgent jobs should be designed.