Composite dispatching rule design for dynamic scheduling with customer-oriented production priority control

In practice, the criteria considered for production scheduling objectives are generally derived from some desired production performance factors of a manufacturing system. On the other hand, customer-oriented production priority management focuses on the analysis of operational production management policies that cannot be readily measured in a quantitative manner. This paper presents an approach for multiobjective composite dispatching rule design, which simultaneously considers scheduling criteria and the customer-oriented production priority management policies. The correctness of elementary dispatching rule selection is a critical aspect of composite dispatching rule design. Data envelopment analysis is adopted to select a set of corresponding elementary rules that appropriately convey the scheduling criteria. The selected elementary rules are composed with weighted aggregation to optimize the scheduling criteria of interest. Analytic hierarchy process is used for overall job prioritization by combining the different schedules derived from the composite dispatching rule and the customer-oriented production priority rules. The implementation of the presented approach on single-machine, multiobjective, dynamic scheduling is demonstrated by a case study. The production performance of composite dispatching rules that would be subsequently achieved by the presented approach is compared with some conventional dispatching rules, and the results are found to be satisfactory.