Benefits of integrating due-date assigment with process planning and scheduling

Key Words: Integrated Process Planning and Scheduling, Due Date Assignment, Search Algorithms Usually most of job shop manufacturing environments? process planning and scheduling functions are considered separately. Process planning is simply the best way to produce a product by determining its processing sequence under technological constraints. Scheduling attempts to assign manufacturing resources to tasks that are predefined with process plans. However in real environments, system?s performance does not only depend on effective process plans but also depend on effective schedules. As a result of rapidly changing market conditions and diverging customer requirements, integration of these two functions becomes crucial. Therefore many studies concerning process planning and scheduling has yielded the term of Integrated Process Planning and Scheduling ? IPPS, but its integration with due date assignment is very rare. In this study, benefits of integrating due date assignment with IPPS are presented. With the integration of due date assignment with IPPS, improvements yielded in job shop environment, due dates and schedules.