Scheduling of nonconforming devices: the case of a company in the automotive sector

This article presents a project developed in a company’s quality department aiming at scheduling the nonconforming devices analysis’ process. The company faced a problem of low compliance with pre-established time requests, resulting in large fines paid to its customers of the automotive sector. In order to overcome this problem, scheduling tools were developed and tested, with the goal of minimizing the number of tardy tasks in identical parallel machines. The simulation of different scheduling rules allowed confirmation that the current prioritization rule is not the most effective one. Preliminary simulations were carried out using Lekin software [18], showing that other criteria promote better results. The use of a newly developed algorithm, combining two different criteria, resulted in a reduction of tardy tasks, thus decreasing tardiness fines paid to customers. Despite the preliminary status of present results, it is possible to foresee some improvements in the analysis process performance, by using decision making support tools based on scheduling algorithms. This way, a significant improvement on the number of analysis which fulfills the defined pre-requirements will be achieved.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.