INFORMATION AND SCHEDULING IN A DUAL RESOURCE CONSTRAINED JOB-SHOP

In today's job shop, computers make information readily available, but there is limited research about which information to use and how to u se it controlling a dual resource constrained (DRC) job shop. We devel op and test new order review/release (ORR) job dispatching and labour assignment rules that use different types of information. We compare t he performance of a naive ORR rule (i.e., releasing all jobs immediate ly upon receipt) and other rules in the literature which use little in formation to a new ORR rule, modified load conversion (MLC), which use s all the available information. Our tests demonstrate that MLC perfor ms better than the other ORR rules we tested. But the new job dispatch ing and labour assignment rules developed to use different types of in formation do not significantly improve performance. A sensitivity anal ysis demonstrates that although the shop performance is sensitive to t he cost structure for every policy tested, the new MLC ORR rule perfor ms well over a wide range of cost structures.