Decision Sciences Journal
Volume 31, Number 4
Fall 2000
Order Dispatching and Labor Assignment in Cellular Manufacturing
Systems
Darwin J. Davis
Department of Business Administration, University of Delaware,
Newark, DE 19716, email: dd@udel.edu
Vincent A. Mabert
Department of Operations and Decision Technologies, Indiana University,
Bloomington, IN 47405
Abstract. Although order and labor dispatching in the
job shop manufacturing setting have been investigated extensively
over the last three decades, its representation of actual processes
found in practice today is limited due to the move to cellular
manufacturing (CM). Manufacturing cells have become an important
approach to batch manufacturing in the last two decades, and
their layout structure provides a dominant flow structure for
the part routings. The flow shop nature of manufacturing cells
adds a simplifying structure to the problem of planning worker
assignments and order releases, which makes it more amenable
to the use of optimization techniques. In this paper we exploit
this characteristic and present two mathematical modeling approaches
for making order dispatching and labor assignment/reassignment
decisions in two different CM settings. The two formulations
are evaluated in a dynamic simulation setting and compared to
a heuristic procedure using tardiness as the primary performance
measure. The formulations are superior to the heuristic approach
and can be incorporated into detail scheduling systems that are
being implemented by corporations employing enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems today.
Subject Areas: Cellular Manufacturing, Labor Scheduling,
Order Dispatching, Mathematical Programming, and Simulation. |