Three decades of workload control research: a systematic review of the literature

Abstract

The workload control (WLC) concept has received much attention in the past three decades; however, a comprehensive literature review has not been presented. In response, this article provides a systematic review of the conceptual, analytical, empirical and simulation-based WLC literature. It explores the evolution of WLC research, determines the current state-of-the-art and identifies key areas for further study. The research finds that the field has evolved substantially. Early research focused on theoretical development and experimental testing of order release strategies; order release was then integrated with other planning stages, e.g., the customer enquiry stage, making the concept more suitable for customised manufacturing and leading to a comprehensive concept which combines input and output control effectively; recent attention has focused on implementing the resulting concept in practice and refining theory. While WLC is well placed to meet the needs of producers of customised products, future research should include: conducting further action research into how WLC can be effectively implemented in practice; studying human factors that affect WLC; and feeding back empirical findings to simulation-based WLC research to improve the applicability of WLC theory to real-life job shops.

Deconstructing bottleneck shiftiness: the impact of bottleneck position on order release control in pure flow shops

“…Workload Control is a production planning and control concept that has been developed over more than 30 years (Thürer et al, 2011). While several different approaches to Workload Control exist, a major unifying element is the use of a load-based order release mechanism.…”

Handling the complexities of real-life job shops when implementing workload control: a decision framework and case study

“…Since then, many articles with a theoretical focus have followed. Simulation studies have demonstrated that WLC has the potential to improve performance (Thürer, Stevenson, and Silva 2011); however, there have been few recent successful real-world implementations Soepenberg, Land, and Gaalman 2012b). Three papers have explored practical issues associated with the WLC concept.…”

“…Section 2.1 will briefly outline the WLC concept, focusing on its original load balancing considerations. For a more extensive review of the WLC literature, in general, we refer the reader to Thürer, Stevenson, and Silva (2011). Section 2.2 then identifies complexities that are present in real-life job shops that require other considerations to enable low and controlled workloads on the shop floor.…”

“…Beyond release, dispatching rules should help to guarantee the right combination or sequence of orders on the shop floor. Few papers in the WLC literature consider practical complexities (Thürer, Stevenson, and Silva 2011;Hendry, Huang, and Stevenson 2013), meaning there remains a need to understand where and how they can be handled within order release and dispatching decisions. More generally, it is widely acknowledged that there is a need to conduct more empirical research that aims to improve practical implementations of the WLC concept .…”

Solving the flexible job-shop just-in-time scheduling problem with quadratic earliness and tardiness costs

“…It is known that controlling the job input rate has a significant impact on system performance [58] [59]. This input rate can be controlled by calculating job release times that help to accomplish the target objective function, especially in the JIT context [40].…”