A comparison of job shop dispatching rules using a total cost criterion

Recent research shows existing dispatching rules, proposed for minimizing the total cost, do not perform better than the Critical Ratio rule. New dispatching rules are, therefore, proposed in this paper and are shown to perform significantly better than existing dispatching rules. Under certain conditions of high tardiness penalty rate, high machine utilization, and tight due date, the new dispatching rules result in as much saving as 35% of the total cost incurred by the Critical Ratio rule.