Manufacturing companies often use different
policies in order to meet their demands. Some
response to their demands through finished products
inventories that are called make-to-stock
(MTS). Others fulfill an order only when it enters
the system. These kinds of production systems
which are called make-to-order (MTO), have to
supply a wide variety of products, usually in small
quantities. In such systems, the arrival of customers’
orders is stochastic over time. The arriving orders
usually require different routings and processing
times through production facilities (Haskose et al.,
2004). Among the arriving orders, due to different
constraints, the system is able to fulfill only some of
them and the rest are rejected. Under this condition,
MTO companies have to accept an optimal
combination of the arriving orders so that their
profit and share in the competitive market increase.
The main criteria to select this optimal combination
in such environments are minimum price,
short delivery time and high quality. The conflicts
between these criteria make the production