Priority rules and their impact on the throughput time - An approach for universal modelling

Within the international challenge, customers do attach importance to logistical criteria such as high delivery reliability and short delivery times increasingly. For companies this implies the requirement to ensure high schedule reliability and short cycle times - in terms of high logistical performance - in production. Within this context, the relevance of sequencing as fundamental function of production control grows due to its ability to directly influence the logistical performance. This paper deals with the usage of priority rules in order to solve sequencing problems. The objective is to develop a universal model for describing the impact of priority rules on the cycle time without using complex simulation case by case. Companies do use simulations predominantly in order to evaluate this impact because of the impact of different priority rules being discussed controversially in science. © Carl Hanser Verlag.