In this paper, the authors investigate the effects bottleneck machines have on the performance of a multi‐stage job shop. The operation performed by the bottleneck and its position in the product Bill of Materials is varied to determine the effects on system performance. It was found that the...

In job‐shop scheduling research, the shortest processing time despatching rule (SPT) has received considerable attention. Several truncated shortest processing time (SPT) despatching rules have been published in the literature. The motivation for such rules is that SPT despatching will...

Since its inception, CASE (computer‐aided software engineering) tools have been hailed as the “silver bullet” of applications development. Although these tools have failed to live up to such an advance billing (as do most “fix‐all” solutions), these products remain a viable option...