A Literature Review on Production Scheduling with the Drum-Buffer-Rope Technique

Minimizing production cost is a key element of the industry. To use resources efficiently, various concepts of operations management have been developed since the Industrial Revolution such as just in time, total quality control or lean manufacturing. Manufacturing shops – classified broadly as job, batch or flow shop according to process type, standardization level or quantity of production – continue to evolve by applying these various improvement approaches. Synchronous manufacturing and theory of constraints attempt to improve production processes by analyzing operational measures. They emphasize the importance of work in process levels and amend to have short term planning processes organized in accordance with the system constraints. This review tries to highlight the important connections between the drum-buffer-rope scheduling, single piece flow and operations-finance interface.