A Reference Model for Development of Production Scheduling Systems

Many kinds of scheduling systems have been installed for many kinds of manufacturing factories more than thirty years until now. A production scheduling system includes very important functions for production cost reduction and the improvement in customer satisfaction. However, not all systematization has been successful. Therefore, in order to realize homogeneous systematization to various kinds of production processes, a reference model for development of production scheduling systems with flexible extendibility and adoptability related to dynamic changes is desired. In System Technical Committee of Electronics, Information and Systems Technical Society, IEEJ, "Working Group of a Reference Model for Production Scheduling System Construction based on Business Process Modeling" was launched in April 2012. The purposes of this working group are to conduct investigation and analysis of a decision making process of production scheduling and provide a reference model for system construction which is applied when production scheduling systems are developed. In this paper, difficulties of constructing scheduling systems are reviewed, a novel reference model formed through the discussion in this working group is shown, and the systematization technique called “spiral evolution” for small and medium-sized enterprises is also introduced.