Presented in this thesis is an architecture of a sales/production planning support system for order-adaptive manufacturing systems. An order-adaptive manufacturing system is a system to satisfy customer orders rapidly and flexibly in make-to-order environment. In an order-adaptive manufacturing system, bottleneck resources are changed by ordered product mix. Planners must estimate bottleneck resources in order to set the plans executable. Calculation of exact loads of each resource with sales/production plans is needed to estimate bottleneck resources. After finding bottleneck resources, planners can take these actions: 1) to find alternative process plans, 2) to increase outsourcing, 3) to decrease sales/production plans. In these days, however, the specifications of product are rapidly changed by customers needs and technical evolutions, so it is very difficult to manage those technical information such as process routings, process conditions, technical/operational constraints, etc. And this difficulty makes the calculation of exact loads of resources more difficult and unreliable.
The proposed sales/production planning support system has some advanced features. It can manage detailed technical information as master data in order to calculate exact loads of each resource. And it is designed to support the business processes of sales/production planning by providing several functions to resolve the overloads of bottleneck resources. The main results of the thesis research include: 1) analysis of the business processes of sales/production planning and definition of functional requirements of the supporting system, 2) systematic model of resources to calculate loads, 3) development of the sales/production planning support system architecture, 4) implementation and application of the system for an MLB (Multi-Layered Board) manufacturing system.
