• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.57-69
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• 2020

Many researchers have recommended that DBR scheduling would be an efficient method to maintain the balance of their workload among many processes in the general flow shop. However, as product variety has increased in recent years, the process has become more complex and requires the re-entrance of raw materials and work in process. The re-entrant line has known for the complex manufacturing process that raw materials are repeatedly processed on the same machine. This study reviews the applicability of DBR against the re-entrant manufacturing line due to the distinguishing characteristics and the higher complexity caused by multiple visits of a job into the identical process. In order to apply the DBR method to the re-entrant process, the main idea is to reconstruct re-entrant process into a virtual flow process(loop) that has a single bottleneck. This study discusses the following two questions. First, DBR is also superior to traditional scheduling methods against re-entrant manufacturing line. And how we structure and detect the system bottleneck (or sub-bottleneck) through drum-buffer-rope concepts. To answer the above questions, we experimented and analyzed the effects of the applicability of DBR under the general re-entrant process model(TRC, Technology Research Center). As a result, we have identified a balance between loops for cycle time and work in process.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.61-80
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• 2005

Business Process Management (BPM) System is a software system to support an efficient execution, control and management of business processes. The system automates complex business processes and manages them effectively to raise productivity. Traditional commercial systems mainly focus on automating processes and do not have methods for enhancing process performances and task performer's efficiency. Therefore, there is room for enhancement of task performers' productivities and efficiency of business processes. In this paper, we propose a new method of executing business processes more efficiently in that a whole process is scheduled considering the degree of participants' workload. The method allows managing the largest constraints among constituent resources of the process. This method is based on the DBR (Drum-Buffer-Rope) in TOC (Theory of Constraints) concepts. We first consider the differences between business process models and DBR application models, and then develop the modified drum, buffer and rope. This leads us to develop BP-DBR (Business Process-DBR) that can control the proper size of task performers' work list and arrival rate of process instances. Use of BP-DBR improves the efficiency of the whole process as well as participants' working condition. We then carry out a set of simulation experiments and compare the effectiveness of our approach with that of the scheduling techniques used in existing systems.