New dispatching rules for shop scheduling: a step forward

This paper provides a set of new dispatching rules for the minimization of various performance measures such as mean, maximum and variance of flow tim e and tardiness in dynamic shops. A static rule which minimizes the number of tardy jobs is also proposed. To evaluate these proposed rules, their rel ative performance is analysed in open job shops and reported in comparison with the standard benchmark rules such as the SPT (shortest process time) a nd EDD (earliest due-date), popular rules like ATC (apparent tardiness cost ) and MOD (modified operational due-date), and the best performing rules in current literature such as RR, PT + WINQ, PT + WINQ + SL and AT-RPT. There after, a comparative analysis of the relative performance of these rules is carried out in job shops (with no machine revisitation of jobs) and flow s hops (with missing operations on jobs) in dynamic environments. Based on th e simulation study and analysis of results in different manufacturing envir onments viz. job shops and flow shops, observations and conclusions are mad e, highlighting some interesting aspects about the effect of routeing on th e individual performance of rules.