FLOW SHOP SCHEDULING OPTIMIZATION IN THE CHIPBOARD INDUSTRY: A SIMULATION-BASED ANALYSIS USING PRIORITY DISPATCHING RULES
This paper gives insights on the usability of single priority and multi-criteria dispatching rules for production scheduling based on the results for a German chipboard manufacturing plant. A discrete-event simulation of the manufacturing process has been modeled to compare different priority rules with an expert-based sequence for a real set of jobs. The simulation results show that using one single or multi-criteria priority dispatching rule on the total production system basically leads to a poor performance, whereas using different rules for each machine will enhance the overall performance. Higher performance can be achieved by the expert-based scheduling and individual multi-criteria dispatching rules. Hence, a dynamic modification of the production schedule by switching the dispatching rules according to the current performance is proposed, considering unforeseen disturbances.