Finite-capacity scheduling-based planning for revenue-based capacity management

Finite-capacity scheduling can be argued to be a crucial component of revenue-based capacity management. In that case, one way to plan production is to reserve portions of capacity for incoming customer orders as they arrive, in real-time. In such a planning method, the way these work-orders are scheduled affects the useable capacity, due to fragmentation of the time-line. Assuming the work-orders are rejected if they cannot be inserted into the existing schedule, we develop heuristics to minimise the present-value of the cost of rejecting orders and inventory holding cost due to early completion. We perform simulation experiments to compare the performance of these heuristics in addition to some common heuristics used in practice. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.