Integrating Simulation Budget Management into Drum-Buffer-Rope: A Study on Parametrization and Reducing Computational Effort

In manufacturing, a bottleneck workstation frequently emerges, complicating production planning and escalating costs. To address this, Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) is a widely recognized production planning and control method that fo-cuses on centralizing the bottleneck workstation, thereby improving production system performance. Although DBR is primarily focused on creating a bottleneck schedule, the selection of planning parameters is crucial, as they significantly in-fluence the scheduling process. Conducting a comprehensive full factorial enu-meration to identify the ideal planning parameters requires substantial computa-tional effort. Simulation Budget Management (SBM) offers an effective concept to reduce this effort by skipping less promising parameter combinations. This publication introduces a method for integrating SBM into DBR, aimed at deter-mining the optimal planning parameters. Furthermore, we conduct a simulation study to analyze the effects of different production system environments, i.e., varying levels of shop load and process uncertainty, on both the performance and parameterization of DBR and the efficacy of SBM. Our results show significant reduction in simulation budget for identifying optimal planning parameters com-pared to traditional full factorial enumeration.