Simulation-based assessment of order release strategies for a distributed shifting bottleneck heuristic

In this paper, we investigate the influence of several order release strategies on the performance of a distributed shifting bottleneck heuristic. The shifting bottleneck heuristic is a decomposition approach that solves the overall scheduling problem by solving a sequence of tool group scheduling problems and determines the overall solution by using a disjunctive graph. We discuss a distributed version of the original shifting bottleneck heuristic. By using a hierarchical approach we first assign planned ready and completion dates to all lots with respect to a certain work area where a work area is defined as a set of tool groups. We study several order release strategies. It turns out that the distributed shifting bottleneck heuristic performs well compared to dispatching rules only in high loaded job shops. We present the results of computational experiments