Assessment of performance in Industry 4.0 enabled Job-Shop with a due-date based dispatching rule

Abstract

The current production context is characterized by a complex and dynamic environment in which flexibility is a fundamental requirement for remaining competitive and meeting the needs of the new increasingly customized demand. Being flexible entails making quick decisions and re-scheduling production, in order to efficiently respond to the variability of the demand. Traditionally, scheduling deals with optimal allocation of the activities that must be carried out with the available resources, based on chosen criteria. However, it must take into account external constraints that may limit the rate to which production performance can be completely optimized: the deadlines. As a result, a dispatching rule capable of evaluating the resource availability and optimizing production performance while adhering to the occurred due-dates constraints is needed. This paper aims to propose a new dispatching rule able to assign the jobs to the available resource by considering the processing time, the machine's utilisation and the due dates, evaluating the advantages of an Industry 4.0 enabled Job Shop production system. The system's performances are analyzed through a simulation-based approach with a highly parameterizable and modular model, adapted from the literature. The proposed dispatching rule's performance is then compared to a traditional First-In-First-Out (FIFO) and an Earliest Due Date (EDD) dispatching rule. The findings showed how the proposed dispatching rule resulted in interesting considerations about the performance of the production system.