Development of a Cloud-based Advanced Planning and Scheduling System

Facing the global trend of Industry 4.0, many countries around the world proposed its industry policy of smart factory, in which, cyber-physical production system (CPPS) plays the critical role. A CPPS has the characteristics of distributed control, real time communication, computation and modularized. In Taiwan, most of the manufacturing industries (e.g., metal manufacturing, machinery and equipment manufacturing etc.) still heavily rely on the excel-based production planning and scheduling approach although ERP systems are widely used today. Furthermore, the advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems have been developed over 15 years in Taiwan, however, very few of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) have implemented APS system due to the high implementation cost for satisfying the specific production characteristics and planning constraints. Therefore, this research will consider the characteristics of manufacturing process, automation and digitalization of metal manufacturing, machinery and equipment manufacturing industry and develop a cloud-based advanced planning and scheduling (CAPS) system, the planning engine is based on an intelligent dynamic planning & scheduling (IDPS) system, which can dynamically and effectively generate production and operations schedule, and provide the timely visualized analysis data for production planners in SMEs. Applications of CAPS in a metal manufacturing company has been demonstrated in this paper. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.