Bottleneck-Oriented Order Release: An Assessment by Simulation

Bottleneck-oriented order release has been advocated as an effective and simplified strategy for production control. Due to product mix changes and jobs processing time variety, the emergence of short term shifting bottlenecks is typical in low-volume and high-variety manufacturing. But is bottleneck-oriented order release effective in this production environment? In this paper, we report a simulation study carried out to evaluate the performance of two bottleneck-oriented strategies: Fixed Bottleneck Control (FBC) and Dynamic Bottleneck control (DBC). The performance of these strategies is compared with the performance of Workload Control (WLC) under three levels of bottleneck criticality in terms of the overload imposed to the system bottleneck relatively to the non-bottlenecks. Results show that the WLC clearly outperforms both, FBC and DBC. Moreover, the DBC showed to perform better than the FBC only when the level of bottleneck criticality is low, i.e. when the workload is balanced across work centres.

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