Scheduling customer orders-An alternative production scheduling approach

The authors consider a flexible manufacturing environment where customer requirements for each of the possible product types are known in advance. In such an environment, the development of production schedules involves dealing with tradeoffs between the objectives of maximizing resource utilization, minimizing inventory and production costs, and maximizing customer service, in terms of shorter average lead times. The authors propose a new customer order-oriented scheduling approach with a main goal toward minimizing average customer order lead time. With the help of a simple example, they show that our customer order scheduling strategy is expected to handle objective tradeoffs very effectively compared with alternative scheduling strategies. Detailed analysis of the present customer order model of the above manufacturing environment will provide useful insights about the structure of optimal customer order schedules, suggesting optimal algorithms for special cases of the problem. Some extensions of the models are also discussed.