Three Heuristic Rules for Sequencing Jobs to a Single Production Facility

This paper presents the experimental performance of three elementary rules for sequencing jobs through a single production facility. The problem is a variant of the “traveling salesman problem.” It is presented in terms of the job sequencing problem because of practical constraints on problem solving methods encountered in this situation. The objective of the sequencing decision is to minimize the facility downtime or setup time over a finite batch of jobs. The study consists of examining the performance of the three heuristic rules in terms of two criteria. The first is the optimal downtime obtained by the branch and bound algorithm. The second is the downtime which results from a random sequencing of jobs through the facility. The sampling procedure considers different values of the variance of between-job setup times, the number of jobs in the sequencing batch, and the form of the distribution of setup times.