Dynamic selection of dispatching rules for job shop scheduling

Although the academic contribution ro job shop scheduling is abundant, its impact on practice has been minimal. The most preferred approach to job sho p scheduling in the industry is dispatching rules. A major criticism agains t dispatching rules is that there is no single universal rule. The: effecti ve choice of dispatching rules depends on the scheduling criterion and exis ting job shop conditions. In this paper, the authors have proposed a schedu ling method based on the analytic hierarchy process, that dynamically selec ts the most appropriate dispatching rule from several candidate rules. The selection is based on the existing job shop conditions. This method is appl ied to two formal job shop problems, and the results for single dispatching rules are inferior to the method proposed in this paper.