Manufacturing Chain and It's Production Scheduling Problem

Virtual enterprises, extended enterprises and supply chains Management are mostly oriented to establish or bear reciprocal or mutual relations among multi-partners in today's global manufacturing environments. The cooperative activities described in these notions mostly take place at the enterprise cooperation strategy level and pay more attention on the financial or business aspect. However, as the cooperation intensifies, the collaboration on manufacturing processes will be increasingly required by the cooperating partners. This paper proposes our preliminary research on the problems of enterprises collaboration and cooperation, especially those take place in manufacturing processes. Discarding conceptual confusions of the existing cooperation modes, the notion of manufacturing chain was establish. It attempts to grasp the common characteristics, hided behind different concepts and solutions, about cross-enterprises cooperation concentrated on manufacturing process details. And then, some key factors of the production scheduling under manufacturing chain environment are also analyzed. At the end of the paper, a mobile agent based multi-enterprise scheduling prototype system is presented as an implemented example to show a way of how manufacturing chain notion can be used in practice.