Handling variability for robust order promising and fulfilment

For manufacturing companies, one of the most important decisions is to be able to offer short, reliable lead times to their customers. Here we examine the topic with the focus on the robustness of the due date setting decisions, which means taking into account the variability in the shop floor, or changes in the planned schedules. We first review the literature on the topic and classify the contributions from three different viewpoints. One outcome of the review is the fact that most approaches assume a single machine setting, and do not investigate the problem of establishing a time buffer in the due date quotation process in order to cope with different sources of variability. Therefore, we carry out an introductory experiment to analyse, in a relatively complex setting, the suitability of different due date setting methods under different sources of variability, and derive some preliminary results.