A resource reconciliation mechanism for a manufacturing federation coordinated using an MRP/ERP system

This paper presents a top-down mechanism for coordinating distributed discrete event simulation (DDES) models using an MRP/ERP system as the federation coordinator. The same MRP/ERP system, which is typically used as a coordination tool for interactions between complex highly variable manufacturing systems, serves to coordinate and synchronize complex highly variable simulation models of these same systems. This research focuses on enabling each system entity modeled by DDES models to constantly correct its performance with respect to reference trajectories which consist of planned orders and the size of a time bucket generated by an MRP/ERP system, and trigger a global coordinator which consists of the MRP/ERP system and adapter if necessitated by any discrepancies observed by the entity through simulation models. A global coordinator can synchronize timing of DDES models and provide adaptive time buckets using the cost-based mathematical model and corrected plans using the updated time bucket.