A Customizable Production Scheduling Framework for ERP Systems

Abstract

Production scheduling is an essential process in manufacturing companies. ERP systems support any kind of business processes at any industrial and service area today but they usually don't offer full automation for solving the production scheduling task. In this paper we introduce a mathematical model for describing a production scheduling problem and design and implement a framework for solving it based on a standard constraint programming engine. Our solution able to handle complex multi-objective scheduling problems and uniquely capable of run time model parameter customization. Moreover the input of the model is originated from the manufacturing data of ERP systems via web service based interface. It makes our standard components based framework source system independent, but by the interoperability opportunities it is highly integrated to the enterprise business processes and the ERP processes as well.