A Web-based material requirements planning integrated application

The paper presents the development of an enterprise application using distributed object technology that integrates material requirements planning (MRP) to a job shop (simulator). The application aims to realize an integrated system that responds rapidly to changing requirements and is able to integrate heterogeneous manufacturing facilities. The application accepts the customer's order and performs material requirements planning. The MRP system then sends daily planned orders to a job shop that carries out real-time scheduling and production. At the same time, orders are sent to suppliers to purchase raw materials. After completing the production task, the job shop returns the relevant information about the finished parts. Once the customer adds or modifies orders, the MRP system will update pertinent data automatically to respond to the changes in customer's requirements rapidly. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is applied for the analysis and design of the total application. In this integrated application, the MRP system uses Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) that are deployed in a J2EE compliant application server to perform business-to-customer transactions and MRP logic. The job shop system uses Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification as communication platform.