A decision support to assign mould due date at customer enquiry stage in computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) environments

Abstract

Achieving better delivery reliability performance is crucial for mould industry. Due date (DD) assignment at customer enquiry stage has a large influence on the kind of performance. This paper focuses on estimating the feasible production lead times of the new arriving mould orders that could be used as a decisional support during DD quoting, given the total workload already in the system at a decision time. An uncertain parameter model firstly addresses the uncertainties in the underlying problem using a discrete time Markov chain, which can obtain the initial probability distribute of the completion date of each new order. Such a model has not been addressed previously in related literature. Then, a mould progress evolution approach with limited capacity checks each realising track contained in the initial probability distribute to meet various capacity limitations. The expectation value of the checked distribute is the estimation value of the completion time of the examining order. The application examples illustrate possible applications of the approach. Further, the simulation experiments-based comparison of the proposed approach with two benchmarks adopted commonly in the real-world mould production is provided, and the results are promising as compared to benchmark decision rules.

Keywords:

• mould industry
• due date assignment
• Markov chain
• capacity planning
• decision support

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous referees for providing helpful suggestions. This research was jointly supported by the National Science and Technology Ministry (2012BAF12B10), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51175094, 51205068) and the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (S2012040007784).