Research on job assigning rules for dynamic distributed job-shop scheduling problem

Sequencing rules that determine the order of jobs have been well studied and adopted in real-life manufacturing due to their efficiency. However, the rules for assigning jobs among distributed factories are scarcely studied. For dynamic distributed job-shop scheduling problem with new job arrivals, two assigning rules named MOPT and MOW are proposed to minimize the total tardiness. Their performance is evaluated in twenty-four production settings. The combinations of MOPT and MOW with different ratios are also evaluated to find better rules, result shows that the best ratio is interrelated with their independent performance. The research on the performance of proposed rules cooperating with different sequencing rules suggests that assigning decisions have a greater influence than sequencing decisions.