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An investigation of labor assignment rules in a dual‐constrained job shop
Author(s) -
Treleven Mark D.,
Elvers Douglas A.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
journal of operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.649
H-Index - 191
eISSN - 1873-1317
pISSN - 0272-6963
DOI - 10.1016/0272-6963(85)90035-x
Subject(s) - staffing , computer science , queue , dual (grammatical number) , operations research , work (physics) , job shop , operations management , job shop scheduling , flow shop scheduling , economics , engineering , management , mechanical engineering , art , schedule , literature , programming language , operating system
One of the management decisions required to operate a dual‐constrained job shop is the labor assignment rule. This study examines the effects of various labor assignment rules on the shop's performance. Eleven different labor assignment rules are simulated. A longest‐queue rule and the traditional counterparts of the first‐in‐system, first‐served, shortest operation time, job due date, critical ratio and shortest processing time dispatching rules are used to determine to which work center available workers should be transferred. Also tested are five new labor assignment rules that use an average of the priority values of all jobs in queue at a particular work center to determine whether that work center should receive the available worker. A SIMSCRIPT simulation program that models nine work centers provided the mechanism by which these rules were tested. Five dispatching rules, the counterparts of the five “traditional counterpart” labor assignment rules mentioned earlier, provided different shop environments. Also, the level of staffing of the work centers was altered to provide additional ship environments. Staffing levels of 50% and 67% were employed. The results show that none of the eleven labor assignment rules had a significant impact on shop performance. This is an important result because it implies that a manager can make the labor assignment decision based on other criteria such as ease or cost of application of the rules. These results were relatively insensitive to the shop environment, as represented by the dispatching rule and the staffing level.