A proposed shop management system for the engineering industry

The paper develops a complex simulation model (written in GPSS) that comprises a range of different shop management decision areas such as job sequencing, overtime usage, machine speed variations and alternate machine selection. A suboptimal scheduling procedure is proposed which takes into account trade-offs between machining and delay cost on one hand, and computer time on the other hand. The efficiency of the heuristic is studied by means of model assumptions referring to real-world characteristics in the engineering industry environment.