Comparison of heuristic rules for job shop scheduling

Present-day production systems are very complex. Consequently they require large amounts of computation time for production scheduling. Because of this relative lack of success of the existing algorithms for optimisation procedures, research in this area tends to concentrate on developing heuristic algorithms. These provide an efficient and economical way of obtaining a good feasible solution. In this study, various production scheduling heuristic decision rules are simulated for a medium sized factory. Simulation outputs are used for comparison of heuristic rules. The performance of the system is determined by appropriate statistical analysis.