A simulation study of an object-oriented integration testbed for process planning and production scheduling

Many studies on integration of process planning and production scheduling have been carried out during the last decade. While various integration approaches and algorithms have been proposed, the implementation of these approaches is still a difficult issue. To achieve successful implementation, it is important to examine and evaluate integration approaches or algorithms beforehand. Based on an object-oriented integration testbed, a simulation study that compares different integration algorithms is presented in this paper. Separated planning method and integrated planning methods are examined. Also, situations of both fixed and variable processing times are simulated, and useful results have been observed. The successful simulation with the object-oriented integration testbed eventually will be extended to include other new planning algorithms for examining their effectiveness and implementation feasibility.