Simulation analysis and development of priority dispatching rules for a partial flexible job shop

The focus of today's manufacturing strategy is to reap the benefits of flexibility, which makes it easier to adapt to changing production needs and requirements. Increased job shop flexibility has only added to the difficulty of scheduling operations. Partial flexible job shop scheduling is one in which a job operation can only be performed on one of a predefined subset of alternative machines. Priority dispatching rules (PDRs) are used to decide the order in which operations in the queue should be selected. In this study, a novel procedure has been devised to prioritise jobs in a partial flexible job shop. Entropy method has been used in this study for determining the weights for the conflicting criteria, and the VIKOR method is used to determine the priority of jobs. Discrete event simulation models are developed to evaluate the performance measures, namely makespan, flow time, and tardiness. Well-known benchmark instances and a large-scale real-world problem have been utilised to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. In both cases, the proposed MCDM-based priority rule performed well for makespan, flow time, and tardiness-based measurements.