Information and scheduling in a dual resource constrained job shop

In today’s job shop, computers make information readily available, but there is limited research about which information to use and how to use it controlling a dual resource constrained job shop. The authors develop and test new order review/release (ORR) job dispatching and labour assignment rules that use different types of information. They compare the performance of a naive ORR rule (i.e., releasing all jobs immediately upon receipt) and other rules in the literature which use little information to a new ORR rule, modified load conversion (MLC), which uses all the available information. The present tests demonstrate that MLC performs better than the other ORR rules the authors tested. But the new job dispatching and labour assignment rules developed to use different types of information do not significantly improve performance. A sensitivity analysis demonstrates that although the shop performance is sensitive to the cost structure for every policy tested, the new MLC ORR rule performs well over a wide range of cost structures.