A minimax linear programming model for dispatching rule selection

Dispatching rule selection is an important problem in production scheduling. This paper introduces a minimax linear programming (LP) model for dispatching rule selection in the presence of multiple criteria. The multi-criteria dispatching rule selection problem is first converted into a preference voting system, and a minimax LP model is then introduced for solving the corresponding problem. The advantage of this conversion is that it provides a way to identify dispatching rules that are moderately good in all criteria, rather than selecting dispatching rules that are good respect to only a few variables. An experimental study considering two different production priority settings is used to show the applicability of the proposed method.