A Web-Based Material Requirements Planning Integrated Application

The paper exploits distributed object technology to develop an enterprise application that integrates material requirement planning (MRP) with job shop simulator. The application aims to realize an integrated system that has rapid response to changing requirements and capability to integrate heterogeneous manufacturing facilities. At first, the application accepts the customer’s order and performs material requirement planning. Then MRP dispatches daily planned order to job shop that carries out real-time scheduling and production. At the same time, MRP sends order to supplier for purchasing raw materials. After completing production task, the job shop returns the relevant information about finished parts. Once the customers add or modify orders, MRP system will update data automatically to respond to the changes of customer requirements rapidly. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is applied for analyzing and designing total application in which MRP subsystem uses Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) that are deployed in a J2EE compliant application server to perform Business-to-Customer transactions and MRP logic, while the job shop subsystem uses Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification as communication platform.