Regenerative scheduling problem in engineer to order manufacturing: an economic assessment

The dynamic production scheduling is a very complex process that may arise from the occurrence of unpredictable situations such as the arrival of new orders besides the ones already accepted. As a consequence, companies may often encounter several difficulties to make decisions about the new orders acceptance and sequencing along with the production of the existing ones. With this recognition, a mathematical programming model for the regenerative scheduling problem with deterministic processing times is formulated in the present paper to evaluate the economic advantage of accepting a new order in an engineer to order (ETO) manufacturing organization. The real case of an Italian ETO company which produces hydraulic marine and offshore cranes is afterwards presented.