Robust scheduling in an advanced planning and scheduling environment

A new scheduling problem that appears in an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) environment is discussed. The ability to construct a flexible scheduling process that avoids the need to fix ongoing schedules is essential to all APS systems. Therefore, the concept of a due-date buffer is introduced which is expected to enable the production schedules for each customer order to be flexible at the beginning and gradually become fixed as the processing of the order progresses. A simulation-based scheduling algorithm using the concept of a due-date buffer is developed here and subsequently examined through a series of numerical experiments. The obtained computation results show that the performance of due-date buffers is outstanding with respect to complicated production processes having higher utilizations.