A study of due-date assignment rules with constrained tightness in a dynamic job shop

A manufacturing company may determine to set a specific due-date tightness level as its policy, after evaluating the expectations of the customers, the marketing strategies of the competitors and its own production capabilities. Then, an assignment rule may be selected to set the due-dates of its jobs, in conjunction with the job shop dispatching rule used and due-date tightness level desired, to minimize some performance measures. For these companies, understanding the characteristics of various due-date assignment rules with constrained tightness and selecting the rules most suitable for their situations are very important. Only very few studies have, among other things, compared the performance of various due-date assignment rules under constrained tightness. However, none of them have investigated those rules including shop status information. This may be due to the reason that the shop status of a job shop is highly dynamic and the due-date tightness of the rule that has included this information will be very difficult to control. The objective of this research is to provide a systematic study of the performance of various due-date assignment rules (including those with shop status information) with constrained tightness in a dynamic job shop.