A variety of order release mechanisms have been developed for workload control. In this paper the effectiveness of order release mechanisms in a job shop environment is assessed by studying the influence of single order release dimensions, instead of comparing different mechanisms as a whole. In particular, the paper aims at improving the basis for selecting the workload accounting over time and the workload control strategies, through the understanding of its impact on the overall system performance. The robustness of these order release strategies to environmental perturbations is also assessed through a plan of experiments based on the Taguchi method. Simulation results provide important insights for the implementation of order release mechanisms
