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Ch44-I044963.fm Page 213 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:00 PM
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A BASIC STUDY ON COST BASED SCHEDULING
1
1
Kentarou Sashio , Siisumu Fujii , Toshiya Kaihara 2
Faculty of Eng. Kobe University, Rokkodai 1-1, Nada, Kobe, Japan
2
Graduate School of Science and Technology, Kobe University, Rokkodai 1-1, Nada, Kobe, Japan
ADDRESS : Rokkodai 1-1, Nada, Kobe, Japan

ABSTRACT
In most of the studies on manufacturing scheduling, only time and quantity based criteria, such as,
queue length, average inventory level, and so on, have been evaluated for measuring their
performance. However, it is difficult to find the most important criterion, since there are many
criteria and it is varying every moment. In addition, some of the criteria are forming trade-off
relationship. Therefore, we focus on the product cost as a criterion of scheduling performance. They
are possible to estimate the product cost with accounting methods and to reduce the product cost
directly. In this paper, we propose two kinds of cost based scheduling, such as, Activity Based
Costing approach and Genetic Algorithm based approach. And their performance is evaluated
through experiments with a Distributed Virtual Factory.

KEYWORDS
Cost, Scheduling, Distributed Virtual Factory, Activity Based Costing

1. INTRODUCTION

To deal with the diversification of consumers' needs and to survive in severe competitions,
manufacturers are facing problems of shortening lead time, cutting indirect cost and so on. For these
problems, Information Technology (IT) has been fully utilized in manufacturing systems. On the
other hand, many studies on manufacturing scheduling have been achieved to provide solutions for
these problems. In most of the studies, however, only time and quantity based criteria, such as,
queue length, average inventory level, and so on, have been evaluated for measuring their
performance. It is difficult to find the most important criterion even for veteran engineers, since
there are many criteria based on time and quantity and it is varying every moment. In addition, some
of the criteria are forming trade-off relationship.
Therefore, we focus on the product cost as a criterion for measuring scheduling performance. They
are possible to estimate the product cost with accounting methods and to reduce the product cost
directly by applying the product cost as a criterion. In this paper, we propose two kinds of cost
based scheduling approaches, such as, Activity Based Costing (ABC)[1] approach and Genetic