Dynamic Job Assignment Heuristics For Multi-server Batch Operations:A Cost-based Approach

In many industries production facilities are used which process products in a batch-wise manner. Guided by research in aircraft industry, where the process of hardening synthetic aircraft parts was studied, we evaluate a new control strategy for these type of systems. Given the availability of information on a few near-future arrivals, the strategy decides on when to schedule a job in order to minimize logistical costs. The new strategy is compared with a strategy which uses only local information for various system configurations. This comparison is carried out for a number of different system characteristics such as workload, lot size of arriving products, the number of product types, the number of machines and setup costs. As a result, we obtain valuable information on the relative performance of the new strategy, as well as insight in system behavior of bulk queueing systems in a more general sense