Heuristics for Scheduling Operations in MRP: Flowshop Case (Material Requirements Planning‪)‬

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the issue of operations scheduling for Material Requirements Planning (MRP) Systems. Two general scheduling approaches, namely forward and backward procedures, are proposed to perform operations scheduling in MRP. Moreover, we develop various heuristic scheduling rules for use in the two general scheduling approaches. A simulation experiment is conducted to study the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics under the flowshop case--a manufacturing environment where all jobs processed in the shop must follow the same machine or workstation sequence. Lastly, we present and discuss the computational results obtained from our simulation experiment.