A Novel Spiral-evolutional Construction Approach for Production Scheduling Systems

Although many production scheduling systems are developed, it is difficult to introduce for medium-sized enterprises, because of high cost of initial and maintenance investment. However the functions provided by it, such as available-to-promise under the restrictions of the own process, resource leveling and so on, are required by all of the enterprises to make their profits. The concept of "spiral evolution" was already introduced using real time progress information of process operations. To realize a scheduling system which can be introduced more easily for the small and medium-sized enterprises, a novel spiral evolutional scheduling system is proposed in this paper. This system is getting started with gathering of production information in factories, and through observing this information a scheduling function is installed in a spiral evolutional process. In this paper, the concept of the spiralevolutional production scheduling system is described, and the usage of this system and the merit of introduction of it will be shown.