A study on association among dispatching rules in manufacturing scheduling problems

There are many scheduling strategies, called dispatching rules, for manufacturing systems. However, those rules can be applied mainly to simple manufacturing systems. We propose a way to evaluate the effectiveness of such dispatching rules in the environment of complex manufacturing systems in the sense that there exist two performance measures. Defining a new concept of closeness of dispatching rules with respect to a performance measure, we can find a set of close dispatching rules for the performance measure. This will give us some guidance about which dispatching rules may apply at each dispatching point in a manufacturing system under two or more performance measures in practice. For the purpose, a technique of data mining plays an important role.