Hideaki Matoba

Production planning system coping with changing customer requirements

This paper presents a reactive production planning system that reassigns material and production load to shops rapidly according to changes of order, and then adjusts the schedule or production so as to result in a feasible schedule. First, a shop by shop MRP calculation system that considers production load and capacity of shop facility is explained. Next, a decision support system which allows for changes in the MRP-derived schedule is explained. Finally, experimental results such as calculation times for this system are presented.

Parallel MRP system

Within an environment of rapid demand fluctuations, production planning changes are frequent and reductions in the plan proposal/revision cycle are sought. Also, an enlarged production planning scale is urgently sought to deal with integrated management of multiple, globally spread production points. To handle these demands, rapid processing of large scale data has become a major theme of Material Requirements Planning (MRP). In this paper a Parallel MRP System, using a loosely connected parallel computer, is described. A newly developed parallel algorithm, data transfer method and load balancing method are used and the system can reduce the 10 hours or more required by a conventional main frame computer for MRP calculations, on the 120,000 item level, to within 9 minutes using a structure with 6 WS servers. The processing speed of the 6 machine structure is 5.98 times the speed of 1 machine and the capabilities increase in a linear fashion. In this way simulated applications are possible for MRP in the workstation integrated management of multiple factories.

Intelligent manufacturing planning system

A prototype of an intelligent manufacturing planning system has been developed that can supply customized products on the required time schedule to fill the varied needs of the market. The system has a graphical interactive interface and consists of a sales support system and a production management system. The authors outline the system and explain one of its components, the lead-time adjustable production planning system, which is a production planning system that adjusts manufacturing operations to cope with dynamic changes in manufacturing conditions and product specifications. It is based on material-requirements-planning-like high-speed simulation with lead-times adjustable according to manufacturing operations.<<ETX>>