Manufacturing Control Laboratory with an embedded ERP application for educational purposes

Enterprise control applications are becoming more and more complex, exploiting distributed object technology in multi-tier architectures. For educational purposes, the development of a manufacturing control laboratory that may emphasize the new control techniques and the overall integration of the system activities is a complex and challenging task. In the paper, an enterprise application solution that integrates the ERP concept in three- tier architecture with a flexible manufacturing system is presented. It contains modularized, distributed subsystems in configurable and maintainable software. Starting from the customer order, to planned order dispatch, the ERP main components and the information flow within the system is presented. The software architecture contains the ERP components that are implemented using enterprise Java beans, deployed in a J2EE application server. It enables transactions with the business environment, shop-floor system and the database. The application is conceptually designed and analyzed using a visual model developed in Unified Modeling Language.