Multicriteria dynamic scheduling by swapping of dispatching rules

For most shop floors, consideration of more than one criterion would be likely to provide more realistic scheduling of a given set of jobs. The present paper considers this aspect of scheduling and uses an algorithm proposed by the authors in their previous work for implementing several criteria simultaneously in a shop of dynamic nature. The algorithm considers several dispatching rules simultaneously for selecting a job for processing and continuously monitors the attained values of performance measures. The selection of dispatching rules is made by identifying the worst performing criterion. A rule that can improve system performance for the worst-performing criterion is selected to dispatch the part under consideration. In this paper, several case studies have been attempted to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm. The results of the taken case studies indicate that in a dynamic system the system performance improves by changing the dispatching rules corresponding to the worst-performance criterion at the appropriate deterioration in the performance measures.