Real-time due-date promising by build-to-order environments

Abstract

A vast amount of literature exists on scheduling to meet due dates, but very little work considers how to set these due dates before scheduling the orders. A method is described for real-time promising of order due dates that is applicable to discrete build-to-order environments facing dynamic order arrivals. When computing a due date, the method considers: (1) dynamic time-phased availability of resources required for each operation of the order, (2) individual order-specific characteristics and (3) existing commitments to orders that arrived previously. Performance of the method surpasses that of due-date assignment methods previously examined in the literature and also those commonly used in practice. The median and standard deviation of absolute flow-time estimation error and of absolute lateness are chosen as the primary performance criteria because they capture both positive and negative error in flow-time estimation of each individual order. Computational results from large-scale simulation studies of realistic systems with 20 resources and up to 100 000 orders also indicate the method is highly scalable.

Acknowledgements

The paper is based on work supported by the US National Science Foundation under grants DMI-0075714 and DMI-0122082. Research assistants Andres Lucas and Jeffrey Starr assisted with computational implementation and experimentation. The authors thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments that significantly improved the paper.

Notes

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. e-mail: [email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S. Pulat

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. e-mail: [email protected]