Job and Family Scheduling of a Flow-Line Manufacturing Cell: A Simulation Study

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Abstract
This paper compares four part family scheduling procedures, which seek to avoid setups by sequencing similar jobs consecutively, with four job scheduling procedures which are oblivious of part family affiliations. Of these eight scheduling procedures, four are applied intermittently to finite job sets in stochastic and dynamic environments while the other four rules are dispatching heuristics applied dynamically in the same environments. The shop configuration is a 5-stage pure flow-line manufacturing cell. Besides determining the ranking of the procedures in various operating environments, the impact on relative scheduling performance of the mean time between job arrivals, the number of part families processed, and the family setup-to-job processing time ratio is investigated. Significant interaction effects between all these factors were detected. It can be concluded that, for the scheduling procedures and conditions used in this study, family-based scheduling approaches can generate marked improvements with respect to flow time and lateness-oriented measures.