Simulation modeling and analysis for production scheduling using real-time dispatching rules: A case study in canned fruit industry

This paper considers a production scheduling problem frequently found in many industries whose raw materials are agricultural products. The study focuses on a production system in processed canned fruit industry as a case study. Common characteristics of the system include: (1) high uncertainties of agricultural raw materials (fresh fruits), both in terms of quality and quantity, which significantly affect the production schedule that is usually planned in advance, (2) multiple types of finished products (can sizes and fruit types), sharing the same resources, thus makes their scheduling interdependent, and (3) the shared resources (retorts) are non-identical which exist to provide services to the bottleneck operation (sterilization) in parallel. The paper has two interrelated objectives: to propose the use of real-time scheduling methods based on dispatching rules for such systems, and to demonstrate the use of computer simulation modeling to imitate the actual production system and how to conduct computational experiment on the simulation model to determine a set of appropriate dispatching rules for the case study industry. Nine real-time, setup dependent, dispatching rules are compared using two types of performance measures: flow time and tardiness. The results show the effectiveness of this approach to supporting the decision-making process in production scheduling of canned fruit products.