Dispatching to Minimize Flow Time for Production Efficiency in Non-Identical Parallel Machines Environment with Rework

Abstract

Reducing waste for the efficiency of production is becoming more important because of the rapidly changing market circumstances and the rising material and oil prices. The dispatching also has to consider the characteristic of production circumstance for the efficiency. The production circumstance has the non-identical parallel machines with rework rate since machines have different capabilities and deterioration levels in the real manufacturing field. This paper proposes a dispatching method, FTLR (Flow Time Loss Index with Rework Rate) for production efficiency. The goal of FTLR is to minimize flow time based on such production environments. FTLR predicts the flow time with rework rate. After assessing dominant position of expected flow time per each machine, FTLR performs dispatching to minimize flow time. Experiments compare various dispatch methods for evaluating FTLR with mean flow time, mean tardiness and max tardiness in queue. †