Title: A bottleneck-based due-date assignment methodology

Authors: Yu-Jen Chang, Ching-En Lee

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, Republic of China. Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, Republic of China

Abstract: On-time delivery is one of the most important performance criteria in today|s manufacturing systems. To enhance delivery performance, the appropriate assignment of an order|s due-date is necessary. In recent years, many due-date setting methods based on regression analysis models have been proposed. Although some of them emphasise the use of shop floor information in due-date setting, the bottleneck scheduling information has not yet been taken into consideration by those methods. It is the objective of this paper to propose a new due-date assignment method based on bottleneck scheduling information. To assign an order|s due-date, this proposed method first optimises the job sequence at the bottleneck using a Tabu search algorithm and then predicts the order|s flow time after its completion of its bottleneck operation. Experimental results show that the proposed method can greatly enhance the delivery performance.

Keywords: bottleneck; due-date assignment; on-time delivery; Tabu search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2000.001336

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2000 Vol.1 No.2/3, pp.318-327

Published online: 02 Jul 2003 *

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