Scheduling and coordination in manufacturing enterprise automation

Manufacturing enterprise automation was focused on factory level where scheduling is a key issue in the past. As more and more companies are relying on their business partners or suppliers, the coordination of activities through the chain of suppliers becomes critical to quickly respond to changing market conditions. The rapid growth of information technology is now opening up a unique opportunity for companies to coordinate with their customers and suppliers to further improve their responsiveness. Effective approaches for coordination, however, have to be developed to grab the opportunity. In the paper, existing approaches for scheduling and coordination are summarized, important issues for coordination such as architecture, solution concept and scalability are discussed, and a price-based approach is presented for supply chain coordination. In the approach, each organization makes its own decision based on the prices associated with inter-organization constraints, and the coordination among organizations is performed in a distributed and asynchronous way with prices iteratively adjusted by related organizations. The coordination approach is scalable if the prices are constantly adjusted to dynamically adapt to changing conditions and the price adjustment process is stable