A Decision Making Model for Order Release in an Assembly Job-Shop to Improve Business Performance and Sustainability

The assembly job-shop scheduling problem concerns the parts processed in a job shop manufacturing system followed by their subsequent assembly operations. The order release mechanisms impact both on the production performance and the buffer levels that is relevant for enterprise’s sustainability. This chapter proposes a decision-making model to release the orders in the shop-floor with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and production system performance. The suggested model detects the parts needed by customer’s orders to forecast the parts necessary for the assembly operations and keep a stable workload of the job-shop. The chapter shows the results of a simulation environment that has been developed to evaluate the model, and the obtained performance results. The simulation results corroborate the usefulness of the model to deal with the assembly job-shop scheduling problem and performance improvement.