This paper presents a new due date driven Material Handling Rule Priority Index for material handling equipment scheduling strategy. The development of an agent based material handling equipment control strategy using this proposed priority index is described. The performance comparison of this model with the existing control strategies is conducted via simulation considering average tardiness, maximum lateness, total number of tardy jobs and average cycle time as the performance measures. The results of the comparison signify that the proposed procedure provides superior performance over the other control strategies under the considered experimental setting.