Using Data Mining for Due Date Assignment in a Dynamic Job Shop Environment

Due date assignment is an important task in shop floor control, affecting both timely delivery and customer satisfaction. Due date related performances are impacted by the quality of the due date assignment methods. Among the simple and easy to implement due date assignment methods, the total work content (TWK) method achieves the best performance for tardiness related performance criteria and is most widely used in practice and in study. The performance of the TWK method can be improved if the due date allowance factor k could render a more precise and accurate flowtime estimation of each individual job. In this study, in order to improve the performance of the TWK method, we have presented a model that incorporated a data mining tool – Decision Tree – for mining the knowledge of job scheduling about due date assignment in a dynamic job shop environment, which is represented by IF-THEN rules and is able to adjust an appropriate factor k according to the condition of the shop at the instant of job arrival, thereby reducing the due date prediction errors of the TWK method. Simulation results show that our proposed rule-based TWK due date assignment (RTWK) model is significantly better than its static and dynamic counterparts (i.e., TWK and Dynamic TWK methods). In addition, the RTWK model also extracted comprehensive scheduling knowledge about due date assignment, expressed in the form of IF-THEN rules, allowing production managers to easily understand the principles of due date assignment .