Development of a Cloud-based Advanced Planning and Scheduling System for Automotive Parts Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

Facing the global trend of smart manufacturing, many countries around the world proposed its industry policy of smart factory, in which, cyber-physical production system (CPPS) plays the critical role. However, most of the manufacturing industries in Taiwan still heavily rely on the excel-based production planning and scheduling approach although ERP systems are widely used today. Besides, few small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) have implemented the advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system due to the high implementation cost for satisfying the specific production characteristics and planning constraints. On the contrary, the cloud-based information system is conducive to practice smart manufacturing for SMEs, it does not require high-end devices to have high-speed computing ability, as long as they are in the network environment.Therefore, this research considered the characteristics of manufacturing process, automation and digitalization of automotive parts manufacturing industry to develop a cloud-based advanced planning and scheduling (CAPS) system which is implemented in the Amazon Web Service (AWSTM) platform. The planning engine of CAPS is an intelligent dynamic planning & scheduling (IDPS) simulation system, which can dynamically and effectively generate production and operations schedule. Production planners only need to maintain and upload the planning data to CAPS system and download the timely operations schedule and visualized analysis generated from CAPS’s web page. Applications of CAPS in a well-known automotive parts manufacturing company in Taiwan has been demonstrated in this paper.