Multiple objective scheduling for discrete production system based on compositional dispatching rules

The multiple objective scheduling problem (MOSP) becomes focus in recent years in actual manufacturing system. The most practical way to solve MOSP is using dispatching rule combination based on simulation evaluation. It mostly combines particular dispatching rules with linear manner corresponding to multiple scheduling objectives, however it is difficult to determine what combination of dispatching rules is effective to achieve multiple scheduling objectives and also to adapt compositional dispatching rules to change of scheduling objective. This paper presents a new heuristic method to deal MOSP based on unified ranking measure of the job priority with multiple dispatching rules. The priority of jobs regarding to respective dispatching rules are calculated and the unified priority of the job priority is decided by using analytic hierarchical process with adjusted weights corresponding to scheduling objectives. The simulation result demonstrates that the proposed method is feasible and flexible to solve MOSP.