Dispatching rules for production scheduling in the capital goods industry

Research on dispatching rules has focused upon deterministic job shop situations or small assembly environments and has ignored operational factors. This work uses data obtained from a capital goods company that produces complex products. The paper first explores the influence of the data update period and the minimum setup, machining and transfer times under stochastic infinite capacity conditions. It then investigates the significance of these factors and the relative performance of eight dispatching rules with finite capacity and stochastic processing times. Dispatching rules and most operational parameters were statistically significant. With finite capacity, the 'best' dispatching rule was different at the component and product levels and varied according to the performance measure used. The shortest operation time first rule generally produced the best results, particularly at product level.