Bottleneck shifting in serial line production: An investigation with different order release methods

The workload control (WLC) concept has gained a lot of importance in recent years among the researchers of operations management for its intuitive ways of governing production shops. Researchers have focused on developing several release policies that are executed independently or in combination with dispatching rules in distinct stages of production shops. Most researches intended to employ a suitable WLC strategy in complex situations either to overcome hurdles in production or to achieve optimum performance. In the present study, we model a serial line that comprises four stations with different processing times. The model performance has been simulated under different job and shop characteristics with the help of WLC strategies.