A web-based integrated process planning and scheduling system

This paper reports a unique approach to integrate the process planning and scheduling functions. The proposed approach here is used to reduce the tardy jobs by exploring the process plan solution space of the selected jobs. The integrated system comprises a process planning module, a scheduling module and an integrator module. The integration is achieved in an iterative manner. The uniqueness of this approach is characterized by the flexibility of the process planning strategy, which makes full use of the plan solution space intuitively to achieve a satisfactory schedule. Two heuristic rules for modifying solution space are proposed and the simulation on the Web-based collaborative system shows that the proposed approach can achieve satisfactory schedule performance levels in a fair number of iterations.