Internet based collaboration in the manufacturing supply chain

This paper discusses the collaboration among manufacturing companies regarding planning and coordinating their manufacturing activities. The analysis considers a real-life distributed manufacturing scenario. The suggested model facilitates collaboration among these networked organizations. This model is implemented in the form of an Internet enabled software framework, offering a set of intelligent characteristics, including virtual organization, scheduling and monitoring. The main objective is to support co-operation and flexible planning and monitoring across the extended manufacturing enterprise by utilizing information sharing. The software framework, is based on Internet oriented technologies and protocols, such as the Extensible Markup Language – XML for data exchange.