Performance Evaluation of Dispatching Rules and Simulated Annealing in a Scheduling Problem from a Quality-Functionality Perspective

Production scheduling generates a direct impact on several aspects of manufacture, such as the number of delays in delivery to customers, total flow time, as well as the percentage of equipment used. It must, therefore, constitute a priority in production management, which should seek to implement scheduling techniques that will lead to positive results from the perspective of the quality of the solution. However, the methodology cannot overlook the functional aspect of the time which has elapsed until the solution is reached. This study is based on a real and specific module software improvement into a company devoted to the development of ERP software systems (Enterprise Resource Planning). It presents a solution for the production scheduling module focused on flow-shop operations, comprising a total of nine dispatching rules. An additional solution for scheduling is also proposed, which resorts to metaheuristic simulated annealing. Both solutions are compared to each other by using the quality-functionality binomial approach. These two environments are further contrasted with a third, where no effective solution for production scheduling exists. The environment which includes scheduling through dispatching rules was compared to the environment where no production scheduling was implemented. The results obtained from this analysis show an improvement of 13%. The simulated annealing solution presents an improvement of 3,6% when compared to a solution which uses dispatching rules. This improvement implies one extra minute in the calculation of the final solution.