Examination of worker assignment and dispatching rules for managing vital customer priorities in dual resource constrained job shop environments

The focus in this study is on evaluating scheduling policies that may be used to offer a near-perfect delivery performance for vital customers in dual resource constrained (DRC) job shop environments. Prior studies in this area have modeled shops where all orders are considered to be of equal importance, and shown that any reasonable combination of worker assignment and dispatching rules that are sensitive to the shop cost factors modeled works well. However, a recent survey indicates that shops do in fact distinguish among orders on the basis of customer identity, and that certain customers have very rigid delivery guidelines which must be adhered to in order to maintain their ongoing business. The present study models such environments, and shows that the choice of scheduling policies is not inconsequential, especially if the shop aims at providing near-perfect delivery performance to a limited set of customers. In such instances, policies for deploying workers to different departments, as well as dispatching rules that use customer identity based information outperform their counterparts that are not sensitive to orders placed by vital customers.