Workload control policies under continuous order release

This paper analyses the workload control in manufacturing systems under continuous order release by a simulation environment. The main issues investigated in the proposed research regard the selection of the order to release, among the orders in a pre-shop queue, the workload computation based on the routing of the orders and the workload norm. The simulations are conducted changing the number of bottleneck in the manufacturing system tested. The simulation results highlight how two of the proposed policies lead to better performance measures compared to a policy proposed in literature. The main contributions regard the higher improvements for the due date performance (average lateness and percentage of orders in delay) introducing a pre-shop queue management balancing the workload and the computation of the corrected workload considering the average utilization of the work centers.