Abstract
Motivated by the dispatching problems in our collaborated solar company, we investigate the optimal dispatching rule for machines and manpower allocation in the solar ingot to water manufacturing systems. The performance of the method is measured by the sales profit for each dollar paid to the operators in a 7 days time window in steady-state. The decision variables are identification-number of machines and operators when each job is required to be served in each process. We propose a “Multi-nominal distribution dispatch rule” which is a function of operator’s ability, salary and the corresponding location. Simulation (via Flexsim) results show that the proposed rule outperforms many traditional meta-heuristic algorithms such as Generic algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Simulation results also show that the proposed dispatch rule demonstrates improvement on the sales profit metrics of about 51% comparing with the method currently used in our collaborated solar company.