Due-date quotation model for manufacturing system scheduling under uncertainty

This paper studies the scheduling problem for the manufacturing systems with uncertain job duration, and the possibility of planning due-date quotations for critical manufacturing tasks given a fixed contingency budget. We propose a due-date quotation model to measure the risk of delay in the manufacturing process in terms of the allocated contingency budget. The risk of delay is measured in the same unit as its corresponding milestone factor such that the decision makers could directly visualize and quantify the level of risks in units of hours or days. In addition, the proposed model possesses various great properties required by a convex risk measure and it represents a minimized certainty equivalent of the overall expected risk in achieving the manufacturing due-dates. Extensive computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the model performance. The results show that our proposed model, compared to various existing methods, provides a much more balanced performance in terms of success rate of due-date achievement, due-date quotation shortfall, as well as, robustness against uncertainties. The practical applicability of the proposed models are also tested with the job scheduling problem in a real stamping industry application.