Scheduling Heuristic to Satisfy Due Dates of the Customer Orders in Mass Customized Service Industry

In service industries where mass operations along with mass customization are demanding, they are keen in minimizing all factors such as total process time, waiting time, and movement time for a cost-effective environment and customer satisfaction. In such situations, maintaining customers to a satisfied level, optimal due date plays a vital role. Also the customers may not be ready in waiting for more than just in time. Keeping all these in mind a model is proposed to find out optimal batch size and corresponding makespan that satisfies required due date(s) for all possible clients of municipal services, such as patients of hospitals. A simple heuristics-based algorithm for mass customization is developed that finds the near-optimal solution for different categories of patients. The search algorithm offers better results which show that the model is effective in such given conditions. The results show that the proposed method performs well in such type of problems.