A Study of New Production Input Control in an Agile Manufacturing Environment

Production control is usually composed of due-dote assignment, production input control, and priority dispatching rule. A production input control(PIC) is mainly to control the WIP level on the shop floor. On the other hand, a priority dispatching rule(PDR) is mainly to control the tardiness/earliness of on order and number of tardy jobs. Therefore, if we select a particular PIC which can control only a particular performance measure(i.e., tardiness), it may cause worsening other performance measure(i.e., WIP level, shopfloor time, etc.) This newly developed production input control, DRD(Dual Release-Dates), is mainly designed to control the WIP level on the shop floor by employing two different release-dates of an order(earliest release. date and latest release-date and the release condition (relationship between the current WIP level and the pre-defined maximum WIP level) while trying to meet the due-date of the order.