Data coupling strategies in production environments

To provide real-time scheduling in production environments a very close data coupling between the data world of the production and the scheduling software is necessary. The most significant requests are high performance and guaranteed reliability. This is essential if you do not plan a simulation-based study, but a simulation-based real-time production planning system. We developed two strategies of data coupling which meet these criteria: a replication strategy with incremental data update and a caching strategy. Both strategies are tested for performance and proved under common production conditions. We explain the concept and specify the realization as database coupling technique in the paper. The results of the performance measurements are also included and outlined with illustrations