Heuristics for scheduling operations in MRP: Jobshop case

This article studies the issue of operations scheduling under the general discrete manufacturing environment powered by Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems. We propose two general heuristic algorithms, called forward and backward scheduling procedures, to carry out operations scheduling in MRP. Furthermore, we propose a number of scheduling criteria to be used in the forward and backward heuristic algorithms. A simulation study is performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics under the job-shop environment. Two characteristics, machine routing and demand pattern, are employed to model the job-shop environment. Finally, we present and discuss the computational results from our simulation study.