A New Combined Dispatching Rule of One-of-a-Kind Assembly Production Process

In this paper, we researched a one-of-a-kind assembly production system where every product is unique (i.e. each product has its unique tree-like process route) and arrives one by one randomly with the exponentially distributed interarrival times. We proposed a new effective combined dispatching rule (ELFT rule) that is constructed by considering three factors: the latest finishing time (LFT), the remaining path size (RPS) and whether an operation is on the critical path (CP). We did many numerical experiments to compare the efficiency between the proposed rule and other rules that were reported in existing studies such as LFT rule and EDD rule. The performance analysis shows that the proposed dispatching rule is more effective in reducing the number of tardy products and total tardiness time.