A methodology for planning and controlling workload in a job-shop: a four-way decision-making problem

Maria Rosário Alves Moreira (1) , Rui Alberto F. S. Alves (1)

1 Faculty of Economics

There has been extensive research on workload and input-output control with the objective of improving manufacturing operations in job-shops. In this paper, a multiple decision-making scheme is proposed to plan and control operations in a general job-shop, and to improve delivery and workload related performance measures. The job-shop characteristics reinforce the need for designing a global system that controls both the jobs entering (order acceptance, due date setting and job release) and the work-in-process (dispatching), leading to an improvement of operational measures. Previous research has concentrated on scheduling a set of orders through the shop floor, according to some decision mechanism, in order to optimize some measure of performance (usually total lead time). This means that, since only a part of the decision-making system is being optimized, the resulting decision may be sub-optimal. In this paper it is shown that the performance of the different decision rules changes when they are considered simultaneously. Hence, a higher level approach, where the four decisions (order acceptance, due date setting, job release and dispatching) are considered at the same time, should be adopted to improve job-shop operational performance.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences

Maria Rosário Alves Moreira, Rui Alberto F. S. Alves. A methodology for planning and controlling workload in a job-shop: a four-way decision-making problem. International Journal of Production Research, 2009, 47 (10), pp.2805-2821. ⟨10.1080/00207540701725083⟩. ⟨hal-00513013⟩