The Tool Supporting Decision Making Process in Area of Job-Shop Scheduling

What is it about?

Today most manufacturing companies from machine building industry are operating in single unit or short-run production which is very complex in terms of decision making processes in production planning area. The difficulty in decision making in the area of scheduling is caused by the necessity of analysing multiple factors and evaluating various scheduling options due to numerous criteria. The article presents the author’s tool supporting decision making in the area of job-shop scheduling. The tool introduced in the article enables scheduling based on author’s priority rule allowing maximum usage of the most loaded resource (known as critical resource), which determines efficiency of the production system. The tool has been designed and verified as a part of PhD dissertation research.

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Why is it important?

Today most manufacturing companies from machine building industry are operating in single unit or short-run production which is very complex in terms of decision making processes in production planning area. Range of manufactured products in single unit as well as in short-run production is usually very wide and very unstable at the same time. It is very difficult to predict demand and probability of spreading potential orders over time in advance. On top of that, average time frame from the moment an order is placed to its completion gets shortened [5,6,7]. Decisions made in the production planning area relate to balancing manufacturing capacity in terms of quantities, quality, delivery dates and costs of production with customer’s requirements. The necessity of analysing numerous factors causes manufacturing companies to use tools helping with decision making in the area of scheduling processes.

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