Design and prototyping of an web-based production planning and scheduling system

Abstract

Manufacturing has been undergoing a significant shift into higher diversity and lower volume production over the last decade. To maintain competitiveness in the market and ensuring customers’ demands are met, manufacturing companies are constantly seeking ways to control and utilize resources more effectively, improve delivery performance, and reduce setup and production time losses. This arise the need for Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) Systems to aid production control managers in the increasingly complex job of managing inter-related constraints like capacity, machines, routing etc. Traditional APS Systems, such as Gintic Scheduling Service, are usually based on Client-Server Windows application architecture. Although this architecture is efficient and has been in the market for quite some time, it has numerous inherent disadvantages such as scalability and accessibility problems. In the recent years, web-based applications such as Email, Social Networking sites (eg. Facebook, Twitter), Entertainment sites (Youtube, Vimeo), Online Document Processing applications (Google Docs) are getting popular due to its unmatched accessibility and scalability. To keep up with time, a web based architecture has been proposed for Advanced Planning and Scheduling purposes. This project involves the implementation of a new web-based Advanced Planning and Scheduling System based on an existing client-server windows application model.