featherlite Advanced Planning & Scheduling

The advanced planning and scheduling package provides the components required to extend the planning and scheduling functionalities of the featherlite core package for additional planning and scheduling requirements. The advanced planning and scheduling package contains components for remote fulfillment, policies for order nets to merge the activities for more than a single order as well as the data structures require to manage non-periodic work calendars.

Benefits

• Portability - 100% pure Java for platform-independence
• Ease of installation - server component plug-in to extend featherlite applications through configuration
• Ease of integration - services, queries and commands to extend featherlite core functionality

Content

Remote Scheduling

In featherlite applications the fulfillment of orders using compounds as part of an order net is controlled by planning policies. Two different versions of planning policies are contained in the featherlite core package: a policy to insert the production schedule into the order net, creating one single data structure for the overall production schedule and one to create sub-orders for compounds and fulfilling them in a separate order nets in the same instance. The advanced planning and scheduling package adds a new policy to request availability and the production schedule from a remote featherlite instance. Using this policy you are able to extend featherlite applications to create hierarchical networks (collaborative agent networks) for planning and scheduling.

Production Run Planning

In featherlite applications the fulfillment of orders using compounds as part of an order net is controlled by planning policies. All planning policies shipped with the featherlite core package schedule exactly one order net for each requirement. The advanced planning and scheduling package adds a new policy to schedule all requirements on a compound within one single order to create a production run.

Non Periodic Work Calendars

In featherlite applications non working times are taken into account by checking work calendar policies. The work calendar policy shipped with the featherlite core package handles periodic work calendars only. The advanced planning and scheduling package adds a new work calendar policy to handle non-periodic work calendars such as vacations, maintenance downtimes and other non-periodic downtimes.

Usage

The remote scheduling and the non-periodic work calendar policies are aimed for direct use in featherlite applications. The production run planning policy, on the other hand, is intended to provide a basis for the development of project-specific implementations, since we expect the rules used to production runs to be project-specific. The production run policy is desgined to be extended to meet project-specific requirements by overriding rules and conditions regarding the creation of a production run.