A Scheduling Approach to Batch Production Envisaging the Reduction of Job Throughput Times

This paper is concerned with detailed scheduling of job-shop like manufacturing systems. It addresses the scheduling of jobs, either simple, requiring the manufacture of a batch of parts, i.e. simple products, or complex, comprehending the parts fabrication and their multistage assembly into a batch of products. The Product-oriented Scheduling approach was adopted, assuming that full scheduling of a simple or complex job, based on the job routing network of operations, from the first operation to the last, is performed before another job is considered for scheduling, having in consideration existing manufacturing processors and their availability. We followed this approach because we aimed at compressing job flow time to a minimum as a strategy to meeting job due dates. To further enhance this objective the idea behind Simultaneous Manufacturing was implemented. In particular, the widespread use of batch overlapping was implemented with Job Scheduling Patterns, which proved particularly effective in reducing job throughput time, maintaining operating simplicity and requiring reduced coordination.