A modification of simplified drum-buffer-rope for re-entrant flow shop scheduling

Abstract

This study proposes the layer production buffer to monitor the status of the buffer. A dispatching rule is applied to decide the priority of all orders by the buffer status deviation of each re-entrant layer with the consideration of the re-entry feature, termed as SDBRReentiy, in a RFS environment. To show our SDBRReentiy in a RFS, this paper compares four methods, the abovementioned method, traditional SDBR, the applications of the company K and critical ratio in a simulated RFS environment. The resulting outcomes that compare to six approaches indicate that our proposed method improving performance in a RFS. Hence, this method has better performances when an increase in re-entrance orders of product mix result in the better performance of a RFS. Furthermore, the bottleneck machines operate at full capacity. © 2011 Asian Network for Scientific Information.