| The ability of manufacturing organizations to reliably meet due dates that have been promised to their customers is of primary importance. In a make-to-order manufacturing environment where capacity is fixed and due dates cannot be influenced, rejection of a judiciously chosen subset of potential customer orders represents one way to manage the situation. This thesis exclusively focuses on this kind of manufacturing system and explores in detail how the ability to reject orders affects performance when costs arise due to both job rejection and job tardiness.; In this research three alternative rules (two algorithmic and one simulation-based) for making the accept/reject decision for customer orders have been developed and tested. A wide range of experiments have been conducted and analyzed to assess both the qualitative and quantitative performance of these rules. In addition, the thesis reports on how an optimal control policy for a hypothetical manufacturing system can be chosen as a function of the system's environmental factors. |
