A High Performance Mrp Part Explosion Process Using Computational Grid in a Distributed Database Environment

The part explosion process is one of the key elements of MRP (Material Requirement Planning) systems which generate plans to provide raw materials and subassemblies in the right amount at the right time for manufacturing enterprises. However, the process takes up much time as it has to interact with database intensively, and real time processing was very hard to achieve. Meanwhile, grid computing technology which aims to utilize unused capacity of computing power internet-wide is being broadly introduced in business. This paper proposes a grid enabled part explosion process in a distributed database environment and show the performance improvement by simulation study. In the proposed system, maintenance of MRP consists of four steps; master data synchronization, job distribution, part explosion, and writing back steps. Particularly, the part explosion process was found to be much faster using grid resources; accelerated to nearly n times faster with n nodes when the writing back step is performed afterwards.