Assembly oriented production planning

A new architecture for a production planning system (PPS) is presented that is aimed at factories containing flexible assembly cells with significant setup times. The system uses dynamic programming to determine an optimal assembly schedule. The planned assembly order start dates resulting from this schedule are used by a standard materials requirement planning (MRP) system, to generate orders for parts and subassemblies. This is different from a normal situation, where due dates in the master production schedule are used by the MRP system. A better match between the assembly schedules and the arrivals of parts and subassemblies can be achieved in this way, which results in a reduction of inventory levels and lead times