Workload control in a bottleneck-oriented flow shop with capacity adjustments

Abstract The rotor blade manufacturing industry struggles to devise precise planning and scheduling approaches due to uncertainties in production situations. Bottleneck workloads, process time variations and re-entrant flows with varied arrival frequencies would interrupt production schedules and adversely affect the shop’s performance. Hence, an attempt has been made to study the significant impact of disproportionate workloads and the influence of innovative order release methods integrated with capacity adjustment features to enhance performance. The rotor blade manufacturing process has been thoroughly observed to incorporate the uncertain events that cause disturbance in production. A simulation model was created on a discrete event simulation platform incorporating problem phenomena through the conceptualization phase. The randomness present in the process was assessed using an input modelling approach which has resulted in probabilistic equations. The model has been verified and validated to ensure accuracy and was then subjected to 576 experimentations representing different scenarios that occur in a flow shop. Relevant workload control policies are executed to judge their effectiveness followed by Analysis of Variance Techniques. In addition, order release methods were ranked with the help of Tukey’s tests for contribution computation. Outcomes of experimentations revealed that order release methods have a major share of 80.2 percent to the throughput and 42.84 percent to flow time performance indicating the benefits of workload control strategies in decision-making during uncertain situations.