Towards System State Dispatching in High‐Variety Manufacturing

•Development of a new dispatching method for high-variety manufacturing systems that uses system-wide information.•The dispatching method overcomes myopic decision-making by traditional priority rules that are combined with state-of-the-art order review and release methods.•Results indicate a significant leap in delivery performance improvement.•This is achieved by dynamically adjusting the control decisions based on the actual state of the system. This study proposes a shift towards system state dispatching in the production control literature on high-variety manufacturing. System state dispatching lets the decision on what order to produce next be driven by system-wide implications while trading of an array of control objectives. This contrasts the current literature that uses hierarchical order review and release methods that control the system at release, whilst myopic priority rules control order dispatching based on local queue information. We develop such a system state dispatching method, called FOCUS, and test it using simulation. The results show that FOCUS enables a big leap forward in production control performance. Specifically, FOCUS reduces the number of orders delivered late by a factor of one to eight and mean tardiness by a factor of two to ten compared to state-of-the-art production control methods. These results are consistent over a wide variety of conditions related to routing direction, routing length, process time variability and due date tightness.