Abstract
In job shop manufacturing environments, controlling the release of work orders can significantly improve system performance, especially when a few bottleneck resources limit shop throughput. A periodic order release policy measures the remaining workload of the bottlenecks and releases just enough work orders to bring the workload to specified threshold values. The thresholds should limit the work-in-process inventory but not delay order completion by starving the bottlenecks. In this paper we consider the problem of setting thresholds that minimize the expected cost of work-in-process inventory and order tardiness. For the single-bottleneck system, we propose a stochastic optimization approach that uses smoothed perturbation analysis to estimate the objective function gradient. Our computational experiments compare different methods that set good threshold values and show that periodic order release improves system performance.
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FU , M.C., HERRMANN , J.W. & NARAYANASWAMY , M. Setting thresholds for periodic order release. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing 8, 369–383 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018554115169
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018554115169