Many companies rely on Material Requirements Planning (MRP) to support their Production Scheduling and Control (PS&C) functions. Since MRP does not provide a detailed shop floor schedule, these users have to implement either a third party procedure or an internally developed procedure for shop floor controls. In this thesis we consider a class of user shops which are characterized by the following features:
Homogenous machines, that is all machines can produce all products.
Each product requires a setup, but several products may have a common setup.
MRP requirements are specified on a weekly basis while actual requirements are specified on a hourly basis.
Specifically, we develop a MRP and Finite Scheduling System (MFSS) which calculates the weekly net change requirements of products, then generates the detailed daily job order schedules, and finally sequences jobs on machine queues. The objectives of the system are to maximize the utilization of the machines and to minimize setup times. The MFSS was programmed on a personal computer-based system utilizing off-the-shelf relational database software
