Design of an order acceptance and scheduling module in a unified framework with product and process features

In manufacturing industry, advanced production planning becomes challenging when collaborative manufacturing is involved. First, manufacturing tasks are driven by the customer´s requirements which are constantly changing. Therefore, order acceptance becomes a complicated problem because it is difficult to answer whether the order can be fulfilled or not. Further, each contractor´s capacity becomes a factor to be considered constantly in the overall dynamic planning and scheduling activities. Such effort requires the mapping exercise between manufacturing tasks and contractors´ capabilities with some detailed optimization. On the other hand, engineering configuration solutions for customers are constantly updated, so are the manufacturing tasks, and then supplier/contractor jobs. Customer-oriented manufacturing demands full integration of engineering design and production planning in an integrated environment. This paper proposes a generic framework in an advanced Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for the unification of product and process models in order to fulfill the variety of customer orders. A feature-based production scheduling and capacity management data structure model is suggested accordingly. Based on the suggested framework, an order acceptance and scheduling (OAS) module within Visual Manufacturing (a commercial ERP system) is designed. Technologically, a new feature category, i.e. process features, including capacity and customer profile features, is introduced for further research and implementation.