Development of a Job Shop Scheduling Procedure for Reducing Production Lead Time

Abstract

The authors have developed a scheduling procedure for reducing production lead times of machining parts in a job shop factory. The procedure basically utilizes the well-known bottleneck scheduling procedure, which first allocates an operation on a bottleneck resource, then schedules its upstream operations backward, and schedules the downstream operations of the routing forward. This paper describes how the operation in a routing should be chosen as an anchoring point of bottleneck scheduling for machining parts in a job shop factory. The comparison among several candidates for the anchoring operation showed that the operation on the most loaded resource among the resources used in a routing should be anchored for the best performance.