Using simulation based approach to improve on the mean cycle time performance of dispatching rules

This paper presents a simulation based approach to improve on the mean cycle time performance of dispatching rules. The method applies recursive simulation technique on dispatching rules to search for new improved solutions for a set of job shop problems. Due to the nature of the recursive heuristic, performance criteria other than mean cycle time and various dispatching rules can be implemented into the recursive simulation framework without requiring too much effort. The performance of the proposed approach is compared to the underlying dispatching rules as well as a published tabu search procedure. The preliminary results show that the approach outperforms the underlying dispatching rules and is comparable to the tabu search procedure.