Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Production Research on 13/11/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00207543.2017.1401245
Accepted author manuscript, 874 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - On the Beat of the Drum
T2 - Improving the Flow Shop Performance of the Drum-Buffer-Rope Scheduling Mechanism
AU - Thurer, Matthias
AU - Stevenson, Mark
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Production Research on 13/11/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00207543.2017.1401245
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - One of the main elements of the theory of constraints is its Drum–Buffer–Rope (DBR) scheduling (or release) mechanism that controls the release of jobs to the system. Jobs are not released directly to the shop floor – they are withheld in a backlog and released in accordance with the output rate of the bottleneck (i.e. the drum). The sequence in which jobs are considered for release from the backlog is determined by the schedule of the drum, which also determines in which order jobs are processed or dispatched on the shop floor. In the DBR literature, the focus is on the urgency of jobs and the same procedure is used both for backlog sequencing and dispatching. In this study, we explore the potential of using different combinations of rules for sequencing and dispatching to improve DBR performance. Based on controlled simulation experiments in a pure and general flow shop we demonstrate that, although the original procedure works well in a pure flow shop, it becomes dysfunctional in a general flow shop where job routings vary. Performance can be significantly enhanced by switching from a focus on urgency to a focus on the shortest bottleneck processing time during periods of high load.
AB - One of the main elements of the theory of constraints is its Drum–Buffer–Rope (DBR) scheduling (or release) mechanism that controls the release of jobs to the system. Jobs are not released directly to the shop floor – they are withheld in a backlog and released in accordance with the output rate of the bottleneck (i.e. the drum). The sequence in which jobs are considered for release from the backlog is determined by the schedule of the drum, which also determines in which order jobs are processed or dispatched on the shop floor. In the DBR literature, the focus is on the urgency of jobs and the same procedure is used both for backlog sequencing and dispatching. In this study, we explore the potential of using different combinations of rules for sequencing and dispatching to improve DBR performance. Based on controlled simulation experiments in a pure and general flow shop we demonstrate that, although the original procedure works well in a pure flow shop, it becomes dysfunctional in a general flow shop where job routings vary. Performance can be significantly enhanced by switching from a focus on urgency to a focus on the shortest bottleneck processing time during periods of high load.
KW - drum–Buffer–Rope
KW - theory of constraints
KW - order release
KW - dispatching
KW - flow shop
U2 - 10.1080/00207543.2017.1401245
DO - 10.1080/00207543.2017.1401245
M3 - Journal article
VL - 56
SP - 3294
EP - 3305
JO - International Journal of Production Research
JF - International Journal of Production Research
SN - 0020-7543
IS - 9
ER -