A Collaborative Operation Framework for Ship-Building Supply Chain

Ship-building is a typical ETO (engineering-to-order) and OKP (one-of-a-kind production) manufacturing. Collaboration with suppliers is crucial to the efficiency of the ship-building enterprise and supply chain. The suppliers are classified into three categories according to the materials they provide, i.e. strategic suppliers, important suppliers and ordinary suppliers. In doing so, three suitable mechanisms, i.e. collaborative operation planning, multi-issue negotiation and multi-attribute reverse auction, are selected and proposed for coordinating the dependent relationship between the manufacturer and them, respectively. Then, a collaboration framework, named collaborative resource planning (CORP), which integrates the mechanisms and the internal operation planning, is proposed. A software system implementing CORP framework has been developed to support the collaboration and synchronization across enterprises. Result of one application in a ship-building supply chain is reported.