Non-exhaustive family based dispatching heuristics-exploiting variances of processing and set-up times

Group technology exploits similarities in product and process design to effectively meet the diversity of customer demand. In this paper we consider one of the implementations of this concept-heuristics for family based dispatching. Intrinsic to family based dispatching is the grouping of similar types of products for joint processing. Hence, the number of set-ups may be reduced. Consequently, lead time performance of the shop can be improved. Unfortunately, variances of processing and set-up times-as found in practice-have received little attention in heuristics' construction and testing. To address this issue we propose several new, non-exhaustive heuristics. Whereas existing exhaustive heuristics set batch contents equal to all products available for a family, non-exhaustive heuristics allow for switching families, even when the current family queue is not empty. An extensive simulation study shows how this flexibility in batch composition improves shop performance, especially in case of high variances of processing and set-up times.