Scheduling and order acceptance for the customised stochastic lot scheduling problem

This paper develops and analyses several customer order acceptance policies to achieve high bottleneck utilisation for the customised stochastic lot scheduling problem (CSLSP) with large setups and strict order due dates. To compare the policies, simulation is used as the main tool, due to the complicated nature of the problem. Also, approximate upper and lower bounds for the utilisation are provided. It is shown that a greedy approach to accept orders performs poorly in that it achieves low utilisation for high customer order arrival rates. Rather, good acceptance and scheduling policies for the CSLSP should sometimes reject orders to create slack even when there is room in the schedule to start new production runs. We show that intelligently introducing slack enables the achievement of high utilisation. One particularly simple policy is to restrict the number of families present.