Decision Sciences Journal
Volume 29, Number 4
Fall 1998
Customer Order Scheduling in a General Job Shop Environment
James D. Blocher
Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
47405-1701, email: dblocher@indiana.edu
Dilip Chhajed
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Commerce
and Business Administration, Champaign, IL 61820, email: chhajed@cba.uiuc.edu
Mark Leung
Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
47405-1701, email: mleung@indiana.edu
ABSTRACT. The primary objective of this study is to
examine the performance of order-based dispatching rules in a
general job shop, where the environmental factors are shop utilization
and due date tightness. An order is defined as a collection of
jobs that are shipped as a group—an order—to the customer,
only on completion of the last job of the order. We specifically
compare dispatching rules from past job-based studies to some
rules adapted to encompass order characteristics. Standard flow
time and tardiness measures are used, but in addition, we introduce
measures that combine average performance with variation in an
attempt to capture the performance of a majority of the orders
processed in the shop. Of the 16 dispatching rules tested, our
results show that four of the simple rules dominate the others.
We also found that order-based rules perform better than their
job-based counterparts. The study makes use of multivariate statistical
analysis, in addition to the usual univariate tests, which can
provide additional insight to managers using multiple criteria
in their decision process.
Subject Areas: Job Shop Scheduling, Multivariate Statistics,
and Simulation. |