Examination of worker assignment and dispatching rules for managing vital customer priorities in dual resource constrained job shop environments

The focus in this study is on evaluating scheduling policies that may be us ed to offer a near-perfect delivery performance for vital customers in dual resource constrained (DRC)job shop environments. Prior studies in this are a have modeled shops where all orders are considered to be of equal importa nce, and shown that any reasonable combination of worker assignment and dis patching rules that are sensitive to the shop cost factors modeled works we ll. However, a recent survey indicates that shops do in fact distinguish am ong orders on the basis of customer identity, and that certain customers ha ve very rigid delivery guidelines which must be adhered to in order to main tain their ongoing business. The present study models such environments, an d shows that the choice of scheduling policies is not inconsequential, espe cially if the shop aims at providing near-perfect delivery performance to a limited set of customers. In such instances, policies for deploying worker s to different departments, as well as dispatching rules that use customer identity based information outperform their counterparts that are not sensi tive to orders placed by vital customers.