Hybrid-POLCA in Job Shop Manufacturing

With increasing competition and customers’ demand, manufacturers are faced with the challenge of improving throughput and on-time deliveries. This issues is further complicated for job shop manufacturing due to variabilities in demands, process flow and process time. This paper proposes a hybrid material flow control mechanism that combines a dispatching rule with the POLCA system in job shop environment. Data are collected from a case company and discrete event simulation is used to evaluate the Work In Process (WIP), throughput (TP), average Manufacturing Critical path Time (MCT) per job and On-Time Delivery (OTD) for three different flow controls. The performance of each model is evaluated and statistically validated. In this study, the hybrid POLCA performs the best for all performance measures.