An agent-based model is proposed in the paper to simulate the make-to-order supply chains. This model is an attempt to improve our understanding of the complex processes going on in make-to-order supply chains. The validity of the model is shown by the simulation of the foreign trade supply chain. Agents are used to simulate the members of the supply chain. Agents’ attributes are presented by t...

Scheduling is a core activity in the manufacturing business. It assists with the efficient and effective utilisation of capital-intensive resources and increased throughput, thus increasing profitability. Simulation is appealing in manufacturing, as it can realistically imitate dynamic, stochastic processes while being descriptive in predicting the future process. We combined simulation and sch...

A high-mix, make-to-order production system can become inefficient when non-value added operations consume too much time, space or labour. To address these issues, cell re-layout is conducted and a CONWIP system is proposed. The cell re-layout started with data collection on current layout, product mix and routings, then the current layout was modified to develop several alternatives, and final...

Motivated by many industrial applications, we study a basic discrete-time model of reserving capacity (equivalently, quoting lead times) in a make-to-order setting for customers belonging to two diierent classes. Demands in each period are stochastic. Diierent customer classes penalize us with diierent margins for the lead times quoted to them. We derive the optimal policy for reserving capacit...

Abstract Seeking to help practitioners establish quantitative guidelines for negotiating make-to-order contracts along the dimensions of price, quantity and lead-time, we investigate the dynamic admission control of jobs with hard deadlines into a single machine queue with preemptive scheduling. Using the concept of minimum workload function, we establish that earliest due-date scheduling can b...

The problem of make-to-order production is as follows. A number of customer-speci"c orders have to be assembled in a multi-project type environment. Each order is made of di!erent assembly jobs which are interrelated by precedence constraints. To be processed, an assembly job requires in-house fabricated and out-house procured parts as well as capacity of assembly resources (assembly workers, p...