Dynamic job shop scheduling: A survey of simulation research

Abstract

Scheduling of job shops has been extensively researched over the last three decades and it continues to attract the interests of both academic researchers and practitioners. This paper provides a state-of-the-art survey of the simulation-based research on dynamic job shop scheduling with a distinct emphasis on two important aspects. First, job-shop simulation modeling and experimental considerations are discussed with a review of the different approaches taken in the literature. Second, a review of the different studies is provided with a focus on their findings on the job shop performance criteria of interest. This paper is aimed at both practicing managers and researchers in the area of job shop scheduling because of the following considerations: 1. (i) The number of factors that characterize a job shop is very large and there is considerable variation in modeling and experimentation across the vast number of studies reported. Important research findings relevant to these issues reviewed in this paper would facilitate comparison of the currently available research results and their extension or application to other situations. 2. (ii) A review of the various studies focusing on some of the more important performance criteria should help practitioners in the selection of scheduling rules to match the criterion particularly relevant to their shops. 3. (iii) Recent studies which have modeled job shops as dual-resource constrained systems and assembly shops have been included in this survey for a more comprehensive coverage. A detailed bibliography is included and every effort has been made to make the survey up-to-date.