A parametric procedure for multicriterion sequence scheduling for Just-In-Time mixed-model assembly lines

The sequencing of products for final assembly in JIT mixed-model manufacturing systems is sometimes based on multiple critieria. The two main criteria that have been discussed in the literature are: the smoothing of parts utilization and the smoothing of the product load. Product rate variation smoothing and sub-assembly load variation smoothing may also be considered. One procedure for treating these multiple criteria is by the use of a weighted multi-attribute cost function, which is an aggregation of the respective objective functions. However, one difficulty which may be associated with this approach is in obtaining proper estimates for the weights. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach (a parametric procedure), which utiltizes only the relative preference information for the criteria. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the procedure.