Abstract
The purpose of the implementation of Theory of Constraints (TOC) concepts in cell manufacturing scheduling is to introduce an alternative that generates a better total makespan of a cell based on a flow-shop production system, while analyzing also the labor productivity of the system. The drum-buffer-rope (DBR) cell algorithm is compared to a schedule based on a random rule to determine its efficiency by evaluating different system sizes. The results show that the DBR-cell algorithm performs better under a system with a small number of resources. This can be considered a consequence of the difficulty to determine a single resource as a constraint in larger systems. Furthermore, productivity also becomes larger in comparison with random scheduling as a system's size increases in terms of jobs.
