Material Flow Control In A Sequence Dependent Job Shop Via Order Release And Dispatching Mechanisms

Abstract

Material flow control on the shop floor involves the release and dispatching of orders to meet customer due dates, while minimizing operating costs. The early release of orders to the shop floor does not necessarily ensure delivery performance and often results in unnecessary shop congestion and excessive cost. Thus, determining when order release should occur and how dispatching should be accomplished is critical to the success of a manufacturing organization. Although there has been a significant amount of research in the material flow control literature regarding the job shop environment, there exists a significant void with respect to order release in a sequence dependent setup environment. This research provides comprehensive literature reviews of order release simulation based studies in job shop environments and dispatching techniques in the sequence dependent setup job shop. The literature reviews served as the basis for developing practical order release and dispatching mechanisms that can be implemented in a job shop environment where sequence dependent setups exist. This research investigated the main effects and interactions of several order release and dispatching mechanisms in the benchmark job shop model developed by Ragatz and Mabert (1988). Additionally, experimental treatments were analyzed to determine which combination of dispatching and order release mechanisms yielded the most favorable performance results under the environmental conditions tested. The experimental results demonstrated that the Work Load Control Machine Center order release and Similar Setup dispatching mechanisms (both mechanisms utilized critical ratio sequencing of queues) yielded superior results, which were robust to the levels of variation and utilization tested.