Simulation-based delivery date determination algorithm

Keeping the promised delivery date for a customer order is crucial for a company to promote customer satisfaction and generate further businesses. For this, a company should be able to quote the delivery date that can be achieved with the capacity available on the shop floor. In a dynamic make-to-order manufacturing environment, the problem of determining a delivery date for an incoming order with consideration of resource capacity, workload, and finished-product inventory can hardly be solved by an analytical solution procedure. This paper considers a situation in which a delivery date for a customer order is determined based on a job schedule, and presents the SimTriD algorithm that provides the best scheduling for determining a delivery date of customer order through the job schedule that efficiently utilizes manufacturing resources with consideration of interacting factors such as resource utilization, finished-product inventory, and due date.